Hallucogens And Culture

Author: Peter T. Furst

Publisher: Chandler & Sharp Publishers
Date: 1976
ISBN: 0-88316-517-1
Table of Contents

Preface....................................................................................................................1
Introduction ............................................................................................................3
1. "Idolatry," Hallucinogens, And Cultural Survival ...............................................19
2: Tobacco: "Proper Food Of The Gods".................................................................23
3: Cannabis (Spp.) And Nutmeg Derivatives..........................................................33
4. Ibogaine And The Vine Of Souls: From Tropical Forest Ritual To Psychotherapy39
5. Hallucinogens And "Archetypes" .......................................................................49
6. LSD And The Sacred Morning Glories Of Indian Mexico .....................................55
7. The Sacred Mushrooms: Rediscovery In Mexico ................................................69
8. The Fly-Agaric: "Mushroom Of Immortality" .....................................................81
9. R. Gordon Wasson And The Identification Of The Divine Soma..........................87
10. The "Diabolic Root" .........................................................................................97
11. "To Find Our Life": Peyote Hunt Of The Huichols Of Mexico...........................105
12. Datura: A Hallucinogen That Can Kill .............................................................117
13. Hallucinogenic Snuffs And Animal Symbolism ...............................................127
14. Toad As Earth Mother: A Problem In Symbolism And Psychopharmacology ..137
15. Hallucinogens And The Sacred Deer ..............................................................143
Bibliography .............................................................................................................i
Preface
It is hoped that the following pages will demonstrate something of the essential interplay
between nature and culture—between chemistry, mind set, and social and historical
setting—in the use of hallucinogenic plants and other psychoactive substances by different
peoples the world over. Obviously, many significant areas of research in
psychopharmacology and ethnobotany, as well as some interesting and as yet little-
understood nonchemical "techniques of ecstasy" have had to be slighted, in favor of in-
depth treatment of some others of more general interest. Besides, this is an ongoing story:
"new" botanical hallucinogens and other naturally occurring psychoactive substances—some
perhaps never culturally exploited, others long forgotten by the people who formerly used
them, and yet others successfully concealed for centuries from the prying eyes of
outsiders—are even now being discovered and scientifically described and tested. Still more
await botanical and pharmacological identification beyond the native terms under which
they appear in the ethnohistorical literature or reports of travelers and ethnographers. Even
for Indian Mexico or Amazonia, whose extensive psychoactive pharmacopoeia has been
relatively well studied, we still do not know the identity of every species used in native
ritual, prehistorically or at present, nor do we as yet fully understand the pharmacological or
cultural role of additives to plants of known or suspected psychoactivity. Indeed, in the
opinion of such authorities as Richard Evans Schultes, Director of Harvard's Botanical
Museum, it is precisely the function of these additives to the botanical hallucinogens that
presents one of the most exciting challenges to the modern investigator of the psychedelic
phenomenon in indigenous societies. Clearly, then, there is a world yet to be discovered.
The concerned reader is urged to keep up with the more specialized ethnobotanical
publications and the rapidly growing literature on brain biochemistry and scientific and
humanistic explorations into the uses and abuses of alternate states of consciousness.*
Many colleagues and publications were consulted in the writing of this book; while their
contributions, personal or in print, are acknowledged in the text, they should know that
without their generosity in sharing their expertise the task of writing it would have been
impossible. In particular I would like to express my thanks to Dr. Johannes Wilbert,
Professor of Anthropology and Director, Latin American Center, University of California at
Los Angeles; to Dr. Weston La Barre, James B. Duke Professor of Anthropology, Duke
University; and to R. Gordon Wasson, Honorary Research Associate, Botanical Museum,
Harvard University. Special personal and professional thanks are owed to Richard Evans
Schultes, who never failed to give generously of his time and knowledge, be it in helping to
identify esoteric plant motifs in pre-Columbian an or in clarifying problems of botany and
psychopharmacology encountered in the field. Professor Schultes also read the manuscript
for botanical-pharmacological accuracy, but he is obviously not responsible for any
shortcomings.
P.T.F.
Albany, N.Y.
March, 1976

*
For example, the soon-to-be-published proceedings of a conference on alternate states of consciousness
sponsored in 1975 by the Drug Abuse Council, Inc., and two earlier publications by the Council, Altered Slates of
Consciousness (1975), and "High" States: A Beginning Study, by Norman E. Zinberg, M.D. (1974).

1
Introduction
If one were to look for landmarks in the study of hallucinogens in the nearly forty years
since LSD-25 was first developed in a Swiss laboratory in 1938, a good many possibilities
come to mind. One would be the discovery in that same year that a cult of divine
psychedelic mushrooms had survived among Mexican Indians, and the rediscovery and
systematic investigation of that cult in the mid-1950's. Another would be the identification
of the seeds of morning glories as the sacred Aztec hallucinogen ololiuhqui in 1941, and the
startling finding nearly twenty years later that its active principles are closely related to
lysergic acid derivatives. Still another would be R. G. Wasson's definition of Soma as the
psychotropic fly-agaric mushroom (1968). These discoveries have accompanied the
realization over the past several years that the most important botanical hallucinogens are
structurally related to biologically active compounds occurring naturally in the brain. For
example, psilocybine and the psychoactive alkaloids in morning-glory seeds are indole-
tryptamine derivatives and thus are similar in chemical structure to serotonine (5-hydroxy-
tryptamine), while mescaline is related to noradrenaline. In addition, norepenephrine in the
brain has been found to correspond structurally to caffeic acid, derived from chemicals
found in several plants, including coffee beans and potatoes. Chemical systems active in the
human brain, then, are now known to be close kin to growth-promoting substances in
plants, including several that are powerfully psychoactive, a discovery of no mean
evolutionary as well as pharmacological implications.
One of my own favorite landmarks is a "conversation across the disciplines" in 1970
between ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes and anthropologist Weston La Barre that has
helped to place the whole psychedelic phenomenon in a culture-historical and ideological
framework and has given it a theoretical time depth reaching back into the Paleolithic.
Schultes and La Barre were hardly strangers to the problem, or to each other. Schultes has
long been the recognized authority on New World hallucinogens, and La Barre is a leading
scholar in the anthropology and psychology of religion, author, among other works, of The
Peyote Cult (1974, 1969, 1938), a classic study of the peyote religion of North American
Indians. It was, in fact, peyote that originally brought them together, when, in 1936,
Schultes, then a senior in biology at Harvard, accompanied La Barre, a doctoral candidate at
Yale, to the Kiowa reservation in Oklahoma for field research on the nature and culture of
peyote. La Barre incorporated the experience into his Ph.D. thesis and The Peyote Cult; for
Schultes it led—via Mexico and his classic study of ololiuhqui (1941), and the first botanical
identification of the sacred mushrooms of Oaxacan Indians—to a lifelong commitment to
ethnobotany, especially the indigenous New World hallucinogens .

3
An Ethnological Reply to a Statistical Question
In 1970, La Barre published a significant paper in Economic Botany, "Old and New World
Narcotics: A Statistical Question and an Ethnological Reply" (1970a), which sought for the
first time to account in terms of culture history for the astonishing proliferation of sacred
hallucinogens in Indian America. The "statistical question" was Schultes's: how was one to
explain the striking anomaly between the great number of psychoactive plants known to the
original Americans, who had discovered and utilized some eighty to a hundred different
species, and the much smaller number—no more than eight or ten—known to have been
employed in the Old World? From a strictly botanical point of view, one would have
expected the reverse to be true: the Old World has a much greater land mass than the
New; its flora is at least as rich and varied and contains as many potential hallucinogenic
plants; humanity or protohumanity has lived there for millions of years (as against at most
a few tens of thousands in the Americas) and has had immeasurably longer to explore the
environment and experiment with different species. Given these circumstances, Schultes
concluded, the answer could hardly be botanical but had to be cultural.
Quite so, replied La Barre. American Indian interest in hallucinogenic plants is directly tied
to the survival in the New World of an essentially Paleo-Mesolithic Eurasiatic shamanism,
which the early big-game hunters carried with them out of northeastern Asia as the base
religion of American Indians. Shamanism is deeply rooted in the ecstatic, visionary
experience, and the early Native Americans, as well as their descendants, were thus, so to
speak, "culturally programmed" for a conscious exploration of the environment in search of
means by which to attain that desired state.
It was La Barre's hypothesis, then, (1) that the magicoreligious use of hallucinogenic plants
by American Indians represents a survival from a very ancient Paleolithic and Mesolithic
shamanistic stratum, and that its linear ancestor is likely to be an archaic form of the
shamanistic Eurasiatic fly-agaric cults that survived in Siberia into the present century, and
(2) that while profound socioeconomic and religious transformations brought about the
eradication of ecstatic shamanism and knowledge of intoxicating mushrooms and other
plants over most of Eurasia, a very different set of historical and cultural circumstances
favored their survival and elaboration in the New World.
These insights, to which Wasson's work on the sacred fly-agaric of Eurasia and the
Mesoamerican mushrooms made no small contribution, have since been enlarged, in print
and in the numerous public and private discussions which over the past several years have
brought together some of us in related and complementary fields. The insights are, I
believe, so fundamental to the understanding of traditional hallucinogens that it will be
useful to spell them out in somewhat more detail by way of introduction to the topics
covered in this book.

4
The American Indians are descendants of small Paleo-Asiatic hunting and food-gathering
bands that migrated in the Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic into the New World across the
1,300-mile-wide "land bridge" which then connected what are now Siberia and Alaska. The
age of these early migrations is still a matter of dispute. Not counting some extravagant
claims that range beyond a hundred thousand years, most scholarly estimates fluctuate
from a high of 40-50,000 years ago for the oldest to 12-15,000 years for the terminal major
movements before the melting of the glaciers raised the sea level by 200-300 feet and
inundated the overland passage from Asia, while at the same time opening a new ice-free
corridor for southward movement. There is an abundance of radiocarbon dates from Paleo-
Indian occupation sites in North and South America that lie somewhere between these
extremes. And we do know that some time before 10,000 years ago there were people
virtually everywhere in the New World, from the Far North to the Tierra del Fuego. We also
know that the original Americans sustained themselves with now extinct big game,
especially mammoth and mastodon, giant sloth, Pleistocene camel and horse, as well as
smaller animals and wild plants, and that their technology and general adaptations
resembled by and large those of their contemporaries in comparable environments in
Eurasia.
Adaptation, however, has to be understood holistically, comprising metaphysics or ideology
as much as physical environment and technology. In other words, whatever their level of
technological complexity, these first Americans moved in and interacted reciprocally with an
ideational universe no less than the physical one, presumably with no more of a sharp
dividing line between these two essential planes than one finds today in surviving hunting
cultures and other traditional systems. It is probably not too much to say that mysticism, or
religion, has always been a fundamental aspect of the human condition, with its beginnings
reaching back perhaps to the primitive origins of self-consciousness.
But the first Americans were hardly "primitive." On the contrary, what little early skeletal
material we have shows them to have been thoroughly modern Homo sapiens, ranging in
physical type from Asiatic Caucasoid to nonspecialized Mongoloid, and generally resembling
modern Indian populations. The direct ancestors of the American Indians, then, were not
only biologically but also mentally the product of hundreds of thousands of years of human
evolution in Asia to a modern type, and as such can be assumed to have shared with other
Asiatic populations a well-developed symbolic and ritual system along with other aspects of
religion originating in and adapted to their lifeway as hunters of game and collectors of wild
vegetable foods.

5
Ecstatic Shamanism as "Ur-Religion"
Now, as we know from ethnology, the symbolic systems or religions of hunting peoples
everywhere are essentially shamanistic, sharing so many basic features over time and space
as to suggest common historical and psychological origins. At the center of shamanistic
religion stands the personality of the shaman and the ecstatic experience that is uniquely
his, in his crucial role as diviner, seer, magician, poet, singer, artist, prophet of game and
weather, keeper of the traditions, and healer of bodily and spiritual ills. With his spirit
helpers or familiars, the shaman is preeminently guardian of the physical and psychic
equilibrium of his group, for whom he intercedes in personal confrontation with the
supernatural forces of the Upperworld and Underworld, to whose mystical geography he has
become privy through initiatory crisis, training, and ecstatic trance. Often, though not
always or everywhere, the shaman's ecstatic dream has involved the use of some sacred
hallucinogenic plant believed to contain a supernatural transforming power over and above
the life force or "soul stuff that in animistic-shamanistic religious systems inhabits all natural
phenomena, including those we would classify as "inanimate." There is no question that
shamanism has great antiquity: the archaeological evidence suggests, for example, that
something very like the shamanistic religions of recent hunters was already present among
the Neanderthals of Europe and Asia more than 50,000 years ago.* It is at least possible,
though certainly not provable, that the practice of shamanism as an "archaic technique of
ecstasy," to use the classic definition of Mircea Eliade (1964), may have involved from the
first—that is, the very beginnings of religion itself—the psychedelic potential of the natural
environment. This possibility is the more likely in that the reindeer—with which man, first as
hunter and then as herder, has lived in an intimate relationship for tens of thousands of
years—has itself a certain intriguing relationship with the hallucinogenic fly-agaric
mushroom, even to the point of inebriation, a phenomenon that could hardly have failed to
impress the Paleo-Eurasiatic peoples of long ago as much as it has impressed recent
Siberian tribesmen (see Chapter 13).

*
There is now strong presumption that at least some Neanderthals were also accomplished herbal curers. At
Shanidar cave in northern Iraq archaeologists discovered pollen clusters of eight kinds of flowering plants in
association with an adult male skeleton. Originally thought to be the expression of the survivors' love and regard
for their deceased relative and proof of the high spiritual development of these Neanderthals, the plant remains
may actually have also been part of a curing shaman's medicine kit. No less than seven of the eight species
represented by pollen grains in the burial have now been identified by the noted French palynologist A.
Leroi-Gourhan as belonging to plants that still play a prominent role in herbal curing in the same area and
elsewhere in the Old World (e.g. Achillea, whose Anglo-Saxon name, yarrow, means "healer"; Althea, or hollyhock,
whose Greek name likewise means "healer"; Senecio, one of whose common English names, groundsel, derives
from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning "pus swallower," and Ephedra, horsetail, a genus containing the well-known
nerve stimulant ephedrine). In the words of Columbia University archaeologist Ralph S. Solecki, who excavated the
60,000-year-old Shanidar cave burials, the presence of so many plants of proven medicinal value in one of the
graves at least raises "speculation about the extent of the human spirit in Neanderthals" (Solecki, 1975:880-81). It
is certainly tempting to speculate that if these Neanderthals, whom Solecki and other scholars now believe to be in
modern humanity's direct line of evolution, possessed knowledge of so many effective medicinal plants, they may
likewise have been familiar with some of the psychedelic flora of the region.

6
Although they must have possessed ingenious means of protecting themselves against the
rigors of the Arctic environment, comparable to those of the Eskimos and other Northern
peoples, the early migrants from northeastern Asia could certainly be called "primitive" on
the basis of their technological inventory alone. But we should not fall into the common
error of equating technological complexity with intellectual capacity. On the contrary, when
studied in depth as all too few have been, the intellectual cultures of some of the materially
least complex peoples—African Bushmen, Australian Aborigines, Arctic or tropical-forest
hunters, or the "primitive" preagricultural Indians of California, for example—have been
found to rival in metaphysical complexity and poetic imagery some of the world's great
institutionalized religions. Besides, as Schultes and others have often pointed out, the most
"primitive" of food gatherers possess sophisticated and effective traditional systems of
classification for the natural environment, and some of them long ago discovered how to
prepare complex psychopharmacological and therapeutic compounds that became available
to the industrialized world only with the rise of modern biochemistry. Mexican and Peruvian
Indians, after all, experienced the otherworldly effects of mescaline thousands of years
before Aldous Huxley.
No system, however conservative—and religion is extraordinarily so—is static, and much of
what we find in the religions of Indian America was obviously elaborated in situ over a long
time, in the context of adaptation to changing relationships with the environment.
Nevertheless, there are demonstrably so many fundamental similarities between the core
elements of the religions of the aboriginal New World and those of Asia that almost certainly
at least in their basic foundations the symbolic systems of American Indians must have
been present already in the ideational world of the original immigrants from northeastern
Asia.
These foundations are shamanistic, and they include numerous concepts (recognizable even
in the highly structured cosmology and ritual of the hierarchic civilizations, such as the
Aztecs, with their institutionalized cyclical ritual and professional priesthood) such as: the
skeletal soul of man and animal, and the restitution of life from the bones; all phenomena in
the environment as animate; separability of the soul from the body during life (e.g., by soul
loss, by straying during sleep, or by rape or abduction, or else the soul's deliberate
projection, as by shamans in their ecstatic dreams); the initiatory ecstatic experience,
especially of shamans, and "sickness vocation" for the latter; supernatural causes and cures
of illness; different levels of the universe with their respective spirit rulers, and the need for
feeding these on spirit food; qualitative equivalence of different life forms, and man-animal
transformation—indeed, transformation rather than creation as the origin of all phenomena;
animal spirit helpers, alter egos, and guardians; supernatural masters and mistresses of
animals and plants; acquisition of supernatural or "medicine" power from an outside source.
With the concept of transformation so prominent in these traditional systems, it is easy to
see why plants capable of radically altering consciousness would have come to stand at the
very center of ideology.
Now, as La Barre's original hypothesis was developed, while Asia and Europe formerly
shared in this shamanistic world view, the Neolithic Revolution and subsequent fundamental
socioeconomic and ideological developments, often cataclysmic in nature, long ago brought
about profound changes in the old religions or even their total suppression (although
ancient shamanistic roots are here and there still visible even in the institutionalized
churches). In the New World, in contrast, the ancestral lifeway of hunting and food
gathering, and the religious beliefs and rituals adapted to this lifeway, persisted in time and
space to a far greater extent than in the Old; and moreover, the fundamental shamanistic
base was much better preserved, even in the agricultural religions of the great civilizations
that rose in Mesoamerica and the Andes, as well as of simpler farming societies.

7
Indeed, the two situations are really not even comparable. There are many historical
reasons for this difference, but one that should be stressed is that prior to European
colonization the New World as a whole never knew the intolerant fanaticism that is the
hallmark of some of the major Old World religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, both
of which massively transformed the areas in which they took hold—although, as we know,
four centuries of Spanish Catholicism have failed to eradicate completely all traces of the
pre-European past, and were spectacularly unsuccessful in the suppression of the sacred
traditional hallucinogens. For it was generally characteristic even of the stratified,
militaristic, and expansionist Indian civilizations that conquest by one group or another, if it
affected religion at all, typically resulted in accretion or synthesis rather than in persecution,
suppression, and forced conversion. These blessings of civilized life had to await the coming
of the Europeans.
Without unduly idealizing the real situation, especially what eventually turned out to be
nonadaptive aspects in such religions as that of the Aztecs, it is correct to say that most
American Indians from north to south, and through all prehistory, seem to have valued
above all individual freedom for each person to determine his own relationship to the
unseen forces of the universe. In many cases this process of determination included
personal confrontation of these forces in the ecstatic trance, often with the aid of plants to
which supernatural powers were ascribed. Significantly, there is not a shred of evidence that
this ancient situation was fundamentally affected even by the rise of political and religious
bureaucracies, or that it ever occurred to these bureaucracies to exercise police power over
the individual's right to transform his consciousness by whatever means he wished.

Archaeological Evidence for the Earliest Hallucinogen

This value given to freedom is especially noteworthy in that in The Natural Mind (1972), Dr.
Andrew T. Weil has argued that "the desire to alter consciousness periodically is an innate,
normal drive analogous to hunger or the sexual drive" (p. 17). While drugs are only one
means of satisfying this drive, he maintained, it is nevertheless this inborn biological—as
opposed to socioculturally conditioned—need of the psyche for periods of nonordinary
consciousness that accounts for the near-universal use of intoxicants by peoples all over the
world, on whatever level of cultural complexity, and apparently in all periods of human
history.
Weil may well be correct; certainly he makes a persuasive cross-cultural case that the
desire for temporary states of altered consciousness is embedded in the neurophysiological
structure of the brain rather than in social conditioning. But while his hypothesis may be
sound, for the present it must rest on circumstantial evidence. On the other hand. La
Barre's proposition that the earliest Americans must have brought their fascination for the
psychedelic flora with them from their Asian homeland, as a function of ecstatic visionary
shamanism, now seems confirmed by prehistoric archaeology (La Barre's and Weil's are not,
of course, mutually exclusive hypotheses).
What makes this proposition particularly interesting is that the evidence concerns one of the
few physiologically hazardous (though not addictive) hallucinogens employed by American
Indians. This is the so-called "mescal bean," which in reality has nothing to do with mescal
(a distilled Mexican liquor produced from a species of agave) but is the red, beanlike seed of
Sophora secundiflora, a leguminous flowering shrub native to Texas and northern Mexico.
These seeds contain, like Genista canariensis, a nineteenth-century import from the Canary
Islands whose small yellow flowers are now ritually smoked by Yaqui shamans in northern
Mexico, a highly toxic quinolizidine alkaloid called cytisine. In high doses cytisine is capable
of causing nausea, convulsions, hallucinations, and even death from respiratory failure
(Schultes, 1972a).

8
Notwithstanding such obvious disadvantages, Sophora seems to be the oldest and longest-
lived New World hallucinogen; at least it is the earliest for which we have direct and
sustained evidence. Historically, the potent seeds were the focus of a widespread complex
of ecstatic visionary shamanistic medicine societies among the tribes of the Southern Plains,
until in the final decades of the nineteenth century Sophora was finally replaced by the
more benign peyote cactus, while the red-bean cults themselves were supplanted by the
new syncretistic peyote religion that eventually was embraced as the Native American
Church by 225,000 Indians from the Rio Grande in Texas to the Canadian Plains.
The first European mention of Sophora secundiflora dates back to 1539, when Cabeza de
Vaca reported the seeds as an item of trade among the Indians of Texas. But its history can
be extended to the very beginnings of the settlement of the Southwest by the early hunters
coming down from the north. The radiocarbon laboratory of the Smithsonian Institution has
now confirmed that the hallucinogenic mescal bean was well integrated not only into the
preagricultural Western Archaic or Desert Culture, from its earliest levels to AD 1000, but
that it was already known and employed by Paleo-Indians toward the end of the preceding
Late Pleistocene big-game-hunting period, 10-11,000 years ago—not long after the
cessation of the last overland migrations from Asia (Adovasio and Fry, 1975). At the very
least this is strong circumstantial evidence for the La Barre hypothesis of Paleolithic roots
for the hallucinogenic complex in the Americas.
Caches of Sophora seeds and associated artifacts and rock paintings reminiscent of the
historic red-bean cults of the Southern Plains were found by archaeologists in a dozen or
more rock shelters in Texas and northern Mexico, often together with another narcotic
species, Ungnadia speciosa. At Frightful Cave, the earliest occurrence of Sophora was dated
at 7265 BC, with a margin of error of only 85 years in either direction. The seeds were also
found in all the later cultural strata, up to the abandonment of the site. At Fate Bell Shelter
in the Amistad Reservoir area of Trans-Pecos Texas, a region rich in ancient shamanistic
rock paintings, the narcotic seeds of S. secundiflora and U. speciosa were found in every
level, from 7000 BC to AD 1000, when the Desert Culture finally gave way to a new way of
life based on maize agriculture. Of the greatest interest, however, were the radiocarbon
dates from Bonfire Shelter. This well-studied rock-shelter site yielded Sophora seeds from
its lowest occupational stratum, known as Bone Bed II, dated at 8440 to 8120 BC, or well
into the Late Pleistocene big-game-hunting era. Indeed, the hallucinogenic seeds were
found with Folsom and Plainview-type projectile points and the bones of a large extinct
species of Pleistocene bison. Bison antiquus.
It is certainly noteworthy that apparently a single hallucinogen, the Sophora bean, should
have enjoyed an uninterrupted reign of over 10,000 years—from the ninth millennium BC
well into the nineteenth century and the disintegration of traditional Indian culture—as the
focus of ecstatic-visionary shamanism, and for all but a few centuries of that enormous span
of time in the context of the well-documented, conservative, and evidently highly successful
homogeneous ecological adaptation we know as the Desert Culture of southwestern North
America. This is all the more extraordinary in that of all the many native hallucinogens only
the genus Datura ("Jimsonweed") poses so great a physiological risk as does Sophora
secundiflora. Clearly, the individual, social, and supernatural benefits ascribed to the drug
must have outweighed its disadvantages.

9
Peyote: Sacred "Medicine" or "Dangerous Narcotic"?
Without necessarily advocating unrestricted availability of every hallucinogen less
demonstrably risky to health than S. secundiflora or Datura, one would hope that lessons
would soon be drawn from the abundant cultural and psychopharmacological data available
to us for most of the botanical hallucinogens that have played a major role in the context of
magicoreligious rites and curing practices, particularly among American Indians. Peyote, to
mention only one, has a proven cultural history of more than 2,000 years in Mesoamerica,
and is likely to be far older still than its first botanically recognizable representation in
archaeological tomb art dating to the period from 100 BC to AD 100. More than 10,000
Huichols and many other Mexican Indians continue to deem peyote sacred and charged with
great therapeutic powers for body and mind. For nearly a quarter-million North American
Indians, their own efforts and those of their allies among anthropologists and civil
libertarians over the past decades have finally made peyote use legal within the framework
of the Native American Church. But for those outside that church, the bitter-tasting
spineless little cactus plant is supposed to be so dangerous to the individual and to society
that its possession for "unlawful" purposes or sale to others can (at least under New York
State's retrogressive drug law) result in punishment as harsh as that for dealing heroin—
with the measurable direct social costs running well into the hundreds of thousands of
dollars for a successful conviction resulting in long incarceration. This in the face of a vast
body of scientific evidence, as freely available in print to legislators and the law-
enforcement establishment as it is to the academic community! Despite the work of
generations of scholars, from anthropologists and ethnobotanists to pharmacologists and
psychiatrists, then, it seems as though in our social policies we have not advanced very far
beyond the superstitious fulminations of sixteenth-century Spanish Inquisitors in Mexico and
their particular means for dealing with a core element of traditional Indian religion, one they
feared and abhorred as the Devil's own handiwork but also one that, if Weil and other
students of consciousness are right, is inseparable from the human condition itself.
The chapters that follow are not intended as an exhaustive treatment of hallucinogens, but
mainly as a selective introduction to the botany and pharmacology of psychoactive
substances in their cultural context. For, quite apart from purely biochemical effects, as
several field workers have noted, it is primarily the mind set and the culture of the user and
his social group that determine the nature and intensity of the ecstatic experience and how
that experience is interpreted and assimilated.

Other Pathways to "Alternate States"

Nor do I mean to imply that psychoactive plants or animal secretions have always and
everywhere been the only, or even the principal, means of achieving altered states of
consciousness. On the contrary, over vast areas of North America many aboriginal peoples
achieved the same ends by nonchemical means: fasting, thirsting, self-mutilation, torture,
exposure to the elements, sleeplessness, incessant dancing and other means of total
exhaustion, bleeding, plunging into ice-cold pools, near-drowning, laceration with thorns
and animal teeth, and other painful ordeals, as well as a variety of nonhurtful "triggers,"
such as different kinds of rhythmic activity, self-hypnosis, meditation, chanting, drumming,
and music. Some shamans may also have used mirrors of pyrite, obsidian, and other
materials to place themselves into trances, as some Indian shamans in Mexico still do. Most
dramatic of known techniques were surely the spirit-quest ordeals of certain Plains Indian
tribes, such as the Oglala Sioux and the Mandan.

10
George Catlin, a Pennsylvania lawyer born in 1796 who in the mid-1800's became the dean
of documentary painters of the American Indian and his aboriginal culture, and who was one
of the few white men privileged to witness the entire ceremony, has left us a vivid account
as well as paintings and drawings of the vision-seeking ordeal practiced by the Mandan
(Donaldson, 1886). Already greatly weakened from hunger and thirst and four consecutive
sleepless days and nights, the candidates had holes pierced with knives through the flesh of
their shoulders or breasts. Through these holes they were suspended by skewers and
thongs from the center pole of the great Medicine Lodge. The vision seeker's shield, bow,
quiver, and other belongings were suspended from still more skewers passed through other
parts of his body, and in many instances even a heavy bison skull was attached to each arm
and leg. Attendants with long poles caused his body to twirl ever faster until the candidate,
streaming with blood, passed out from the pain, his medicine bag dropping from his hands
and his body hanging apparently lifeless.* He was then lowered to the ground and allowed
to recover, but the ordeal was not over. There was still the sacrifice of the little finger of his
left hand (which was chopped off and offered to the Great Spirit), to be followed by a
furious race around an altar, with the bison skulls and other weights dragging behind the
candidate, until he could endure no more and fell in a dead faint. With that collapse, the
purpose of the ordeal—which took place in connection with the great Sun Dance festival at
the end of the summer bison hunt—was accomplished. Whites generally interpreted the
ritual as a test of courage and fortitude, or preferred to see it as an example of Indian
"cruelty," but in fact it belongs well within the general tradition of the ecstatic spirit quest,
however extreme it may be as an example of the drugless vision-inducing ordeal.
Interestingly enough, ordeals of this type if not necessarily of the same intensity were not
uncommon even in ancient Mexico, notwithstanding the widespread use of plant
hallucinogens to achieve altered states of consciousness. Self-mutilation is depicted in the
ritual art of different pre-Hispanic cultures and periods, from about 1300 BC to the
Conquest, and bloodletting rites that must have inflicted severe pain (including perforation
of the penis, tongue, and other organs with cactus thorns, stingray barbs, and other sharp
instruments) are described in the early ethnohistoric literature on Maya and central Mexican
customs. The Maya may even have practiced a vision-quest ritual resembling that described
by Catlin for the Great Plains. I am familiar with at least one naturalistic Maya figurine from
the island of Jaina, in the Gulf of Campeche, depicting what seems to be a priest with four
perforated folds of flesh on his bare back, one pair on each side. The body and the arms and
legs are so positioned by the sculptor as to suggest that the figure was meant to be
suspended from the holes pierced in the skin—much like the vision seekers in one of Catlin's
Mandan paintings.

*
Twirling, as Weil (1972) has noted, is also a technique by which children in many cultures the world over seek to
alter the normal or everyday state of consciousness.

11
A famous carved Maya monument, dated ca. AD 780, Lintel 25 from the ceremonial center
of Yaxchilan in the Usumacinta region of Chiapas, depicts a richly attired kneeling woman in
the act of drawing through her tongue a twisted cord, set with large sharp thorns. In the
literature, such extremely painful rites are often discussed in terms of blood sacrifice—blood
being the most precious gift to the supernaturals in ancient Mesoamerican thought—but in
point of fact they must have constituted a violent shock to the system, sufficient to bring
about alterations in consciousness to the point of visions. At the very least they would have
created the proper mind-set to receive and interpret such visions. Indeed, a magnificent
relief carved on another monument. Lintel 24, in the same Yaxchilan temple seems to depict
just that kind of ecstatic phenomenon, with a woman gazing transfixed at the figure of a
warrior emerging above her from the wide-open jaws of a writhing serpent or dragon.
Whether or not such visions might have been facilitated by a combination of physical ordeal
and hallucinogenic mushrooms of the kind that abound in the Usumacinta basin cannot be
stated with certainty in the present state of our knowledge of ancient May a religion. At the
same time, we should not assume that all apparently painful bloodletting rites were so in
fact. Even where the shock to the system was sufficient to trigger an alternate state of
consciousness, the perception of pain could have been blocked by a properly trained
individual;* indeed, there are sixteenth-century accounts by Spanish observers of self-
sacrificial rites involving severe laceration of the penis where no pain was said to have been
felt and no blood flowed. In this connection it might be noted that in depictions in Maya art
of bloodletting rituals of the most severe kind the expressions of the individuals involved are
calm and serene, lacking any indication of physical suffering.

*
Research by scientists of several countries, including the United States, Great Britain, and Sweden, has recently
uncovered evidence that the body spontaneously manufactures pain-killing chemicals whose structure and effects
appear to be very like those of morphine and that within the mammalian brain, including that of humans, there are
molecules that are highly specific opiate receptors which chemically join such opium derivatives as heroin and
morphine. The United States scientists involved in this important research include Drs. Gavril Pasternak and
Solomon H. Snyder of Johns Hopkins University and Dr. Avram Goldstein of Stanford. Drs. John Hughes and H. W.
Kosterlitz in Aberdeen, Scotland, and Dr. Lars Terenius in Uppsala, Sweden, have been making breakthroughs in
the same field. Apart from helping to account for spontaneous mitigation of pain in severe trauma situations, one
hope is that the new discoveries will be useful in the treatment of opiate addiction.

12
Actually, some kind of ordeal, usually in the form of deprivation of normal food, drink,
sleep, and sex, for varying lengths of time, is almost always the essential precondition for
the ritual use of hallucinogens, and clearly plays an important role in the intensification of
the ecstatic experience. As an example, when the Huichol peyote pilgrim finally arrives in
Wirikuta, the sacred country in the north-central Mexican desert where he (or she) is to
harvest the hallucinogenic cactus, he has already traveled some 300 miles from his
homeland (traditionally on foot), and he is physically close to exhaustion. He has had little
or no sleep since setting out. He has kept himself at a fever pitch of emotion by the
realization of the gravity and sacredness of the enterprise on which he is embarked and its
importance to the well-being of his people, by incessant dancing and singing, and by the
observance of innumerable rituals along the way. He has eaten virtually nothing and little or
no water has quenched his thirst. Salt is strictly forbidden for the duration of the pilgrimage,
and for many days before and after. Finally, he has smoked many ritual cigarettes of the
extremely potent native Nicotiana rustica tobacco wrapped in cornhusk, and he may also
have purified himself symbolically and literally by eating impressive quantities of the same
tobacco, whose content of nicotine and other alkaloids is far greater than that of commercial
cigarettes. He is thus already at a very different level of consciousness, so much so that it is
not necessary for him to be under the influence of the peyote alkaloids to perceive the plant
in its animal form when the leader of the pilgrimage exclaims, at the sight of the very first
cactus: "Ah, there he is at last, Our Elder Brother, the divine Deer, who gives us our life!" In
the course of the rites that follow, in the peyote country and back home in the Sierra,
Huichols will literally saturate themselves with peyote, chewing it incessantly for days and
nights on end, getting little sleep and eating little normal food, until the entire social and
natural environment and the individual's relationship to it take on a wholly mystical
dimension. The metabolic system has been altered, and it is in that mystical state that the
shamans interpret the visions—their own and those of others—in accordance with the
traditional cultural norms and the magical-animistic world view that permeates Huichol
ideology.
If sleep or food deprivation or extreme fatigue and physical pain could be employed, with or
without chemical aids, to affect mental balance—or, putting it another way, to facilitate a
different kind of psychic equilibrium—how much more drastic must be the effects of the
powerful, even deadly, poisons that also played a role of some importance in the traditional
systems of altering consciousness and, in the case of the frog-poison ordeals of South
American Indians, still do so even now?
The great sixteenth-century chronicler Fray Diego Duran has left us a vivid description of
the sort of toxic substance which the Aztec priests of Tezcatlipoca took both internally and
externally to place themselves in the proper mental state to serve the deity and interpret
his words. Known as teotlacualli, food of god or divine food, it included "poisonous beasts,
such as spiders, scorpions, centipedes, lizards, vipers, and others," which were caught for
the priests by young boys and kept by them in large numbers in the priestly school:

13
This was the divine food with which the priests, ministers of the temples, and especially
those with whom we are dealing, smeared themselves in ancient times. They took all these
poisonous animals and burned them in the divine brazier which stood in the temple. After
these had been burned, the ashes were placed within certain mortars, together with a great
deal of tobacco; this herb is used by the Indians to relieve the body so as to calm the pains
of toil. In this it is similar to Spanish henbane, which, when mixed with lime, loses its
poisonous qualities, though it still causes faintness and is harmful to the stomach. This
herb, then, was placed in the mortars together with scorpions, live spiders, and centipedes,
and there they were ground producing a diabolical, stinking, deadly ointment. After these
had been crushed, a ground seed called ololiuhqui was added, which the natives apply to
their bodies and drink to see visions. It is a drink which has inebriating effects. To all this
were added hairy black worms, their hair filled with venom, injuring those who touch them.
Everything was mixed with soot and was poured into bowls and gourds. Then it was placed
before the god as divine food. How can one doubt that the men smeared with this pitch
became wizards or demons, capable of seeing and speaking to the devil himself, since the
ointment had been prepared for that purpose? (Duran, 1971:115-16).
According to Duran, the priests painted themselves with this fearsome mixture and,
rendered unafraid of wild animals and other dangers by their magic potion, set forth at
night to visit dark caves and "somber, fearful cliffs." The same ointment or pitch was also
used in curing rites, when it was applied to the affected parts of the patient's body to
deaden the pain.
Who, indeed, could doubt the power of such a mixture on the mind as well as the body?
Covering large surface areas of the body for prolonged periods, containing not only venoms
that would be deadly if they entered the bloodstream directly but also the potent alkaloids
of tobacco and morning-glory seeds (ololiuhqui), teotlacualli at the very least would have
had to cause serious skin reactions, if it was not actually absorbed to some degree into the
system. In either event, it could well have had more or less drastic effect on the body's
metabolism, with some alteration in the user's state of consciousness, even if he did not
actually intoxicate himself with infusions of the sacred hallucinogenic ololiuhqui, as Aztec
priests are known to have done, and some native Mexican curers still do, for the purpose of
divination.

14
Hallucinogens and the Biochemistry of Consciousness
The entire subject of chemical substances in nature and their relationship, actual or
potential, to alternate* states of consciousness is vast and complex. It extends toward the
origin of what Jung called "archetypes," mythmaking and common worldwide themes in oral
tradition (especially the strikingly similar content the world over of funerary, heroic, and
shamanistic mythology), art and iconography, traditional cultural systems of perceiving and
ordering reality that differ drastically from the so-called "scientific" western model,
conceptions of Otherworlds, death and afterlife, mysticism, and, indeed, what we call
religion itself. And, much as we think we already know, in truth we have made barely a
beginning in these cultural areas, just as we are only just coming to grips with the fact that
even in our waking hours our minds are constantly flipping back and forth between discrete,
or alternate (but nonetheless complementary), inward- and outward-directed states, and
that this phenomenon bears directly on the use and effects of psychedelics. There are, of
course, degrees of intensity in the experience of the inward-directed state of consciousness:
obviously a peyote "high" is not of the same order as daydreaming, even if similar
neurochemical processes are at work in the brain. If one were to reduce to its essentials the
complex chemical process that occurs when an external psychoactive drug such as
psilocybine reaches the brain, it would then be said that the drug, being structurally closely
related to the naturally occurring indoles in the brain, appears to interact with the latter in
such a way as to lock a nonordinary or inward-directed state of consciousness temporarily
into place, presumably by blocking out certain areas or chemicals involved in "ordinary"
modes of awareness.† In any event, whatever the biochemical processes involved—while we
should beware of overestimating as of undervaluing the impact that the discovery of
psychoactive plants and other life forms by early human populations may have had on the
evolution of world views or ideology—there are obviously wide implications, biological-
evolutionary as well as philosophical, in the discovery that precisely in the chemistry of our
consciousness we are kin to the plant kingdom.

*
The substitution of "alternate" for the customary "altered" was suggested by Dr. Norman Zinberg (1974) "in
order," he writes, "to avoid the idea that the change alters consciousness from the way it should be." Nevertheless,
most authorities on "high states" agree with C. T. Tart (1972) that these constitute "a qualitative alteration in the
overall pattern of mental functioning, such that the experiencer feels his consciousness is radically different from
the way it functions normally."
†
This is an area of research in which Dr. Joel Elkes, formerly Psychiatrist-in-Chief, The Johns Hopkins Hospital,
Baltimore, Maryland, has done considerable pioneering work. It might be noted that even in drug "highs" of great
intensity, such as with Psilocybe mushrooms or peyote, it is nevertheless sometimes possible to alternate between
inward- and outward-directed states by the simple device of opening and closing one's eyes. At least I have found
this to be so, and I have seen Indians make the same transitions during rituals.

15
The Social-Psychological Context as Crucial Variable
Finally, a word about the need for an anthropological and culture-historical perspective. The
ways in which and the purposes for which so-called "primitive" or traditional societies and
those of industrialized nations employ chemicals capable of triggering alternate states of
consciousness are obviously very different, as are the attitudes with which such drugs and
their effects are viewed. As the following pages make clear, in the preindustrial or tribal
world, psychotropic plants are sacred and magical; they are perceived as living beings with
supernatural attributes, providing for certain chosen individuals such as shamans, and
under certain special circumstances for ordinary people as well, a kind of bridge across the
gulf that separates this world from Otherworlds. By common agreement, in the "primitive"
societies the breakthrough in plane which the extraordinary chemicals in these plants
facilitate is considered to be essential for the wellbeing of the individual and the community
. The ecstatic trance experience or truly altered state of consciousness triggered by the
natural alkaloids, and its culturally conditioned content and subsequent interpretation, are
fully consistent with traditional religious-philosophical systems that value and even
encourage individual pathways to the supernatural powers and personal confrontation with
them, however these be conceived or named. The evidence, archaeological and otherwise,
is such that we can say with certainty that most societies, if not all, that still employ
hallucinogenic plants in their rituals have done so for centuries, not to say millennia. The
plants have a cultural history: they are accounted for by traditions in which all members of
the society share.
Indeed, we can go so far as to say that the psychotropic plants have helped determine the
history of the culture, inasmuch as it is typically in the ecstatic initiatory trance experience
that the individual confirms for himself the validity of tribal traditions he has heard his
elders recite from earliest childhood:
When one considers that datura results in mental images of tremendous
intensity, it is no wonder that a Cahuilla boy after his first vision under its
influence became a firm believer in mythic traditions. Datura enabled him to
glimpse the ultimate reality of the creation stories in the Cahuilla cosmology.
The supernatural beings and aspects of the other world that he had been told
about since childhood were now brought before his eyes for the ultimate
test—his own empirical examination. He has seen them. They are real… .
Once the Cahuilla neophyte was convinced by his own perceptions, he was
thenceforth locked into the entire Cahuilla cosmology, dramatically, with
community guidance and support. (Bean and Saubel, 1972:62-63)

16
The magic plants, then, act to validate and reify the culture, not to afford some temporary
means of escape from it. The Huichol of Mexico, like the Cahuilla of Southern California or
the Tukano of Colombia, returns from his initiatory "trip" to exclaim, "It is as my fathers
explained it to me!" One takes peyote, he says, "to learn how one goes being Huichol." It is
hardly to learn "how one goes being American" (or German, or English, or Mexican) in the
conventional sense that LSD or DMT are employed in the West. And yet, objectively, the
chemistry of these drugs differs little from that of the sacred plants of the tribal world, LSD
being similar to the natural alkaloids in morning-glory seeds, while dimethyltryptamines are
prominent in the hallucinogenic snuffs of South American Indians. And Cannabis (spp.),
which thirty million contemporary Americans are said to have smoked recreationally at least
once, and probably more often, has replaced the potent Psilocybe mushroom in the
divinatory curing rituals of some Mexican Indian shamans, who easily place themselves in
ecstatic trances with a plant that, from the strictly pharmacological point of view, is not in
fact comparable to Psilocybe.*

Urgently Needed: An Integrated Perspective

It is clearly society, not chemistry, that is the variable, since the same or chemically similar
drugs can function so differently in different cultural situations, or be venerated over
centuries as sacred, benign, and culturally integrative in some contexts but regarded in
others as inherently so evil and dangerous that their very possession constitutes a serious
crime. Likewise, it is obviously culture and the attitudes and stereotypes it fosters—not any
inherent characteristics or even their measurable medical and social consequences—that
make one "social" drug, alcohol, legally and morally acceptable to us, and another,
marihuana, not. Addictive narcotics such as heroin are a different matter, of course, from
nonaddictive hallucinogens, but to say that here too we urgently need to apply the essential
cultural (that is to say, anthropological) perspective is not to underrate the seriousness of
the problem—quite the contrary. However, I suspect that until a holistic perspective,
integrating anthropology, biology, and psychology, has become so fully accepted (by the
general public no less than the drug-research, lawmaking, and law-enforcement
establishment) as to be second nature, resort to any but officially approved or commercially
touted drugs to alter consciousness will always be perceived as objectionable. Thus I
suspect that use of drugs not "approved" will remain at the level of an "epidemic," yielding
neither to the most repressive laws nor to the most massive spending for "education" and
rehabilitation.

*
With other states following Oregon's example in reducing penalties for personal use of marihuana to the level of a
traffic fine, similar federal legislation presently being considered in Congress, and the Alaska State Supreme Court
ruling that personal use in the home is not a crime, the situation is clearly changing, however belatedly and slowly,
and however irrelevantly for the hundreds of thousands of Americans branded for life as felons by antiquated
federal and local statutes. The movement toward decriminalization of Cannabis use received a major boost in 1975
with the publication of Ganja in Jamaica, by Vera Rubin and Lambros Comitas (1975), a medical anthropological
study of chronic marihuana use sponsored by the Center for Studies of Narcotic and Drug Abuse, National Institute
of Mental Health. The study found no indications of organic brain damage or chromosome damage from long-term
chronic use of ganja (the folk name for marihuana in Jamaica); no significant psychiatric, psychological or medical
differences between chronic smokers and nonsmokers of ganja; and no loss of motivation. The only correlation that
could be found between ganja and crime was a technical one: ganja cultivation and possession are technically
crimes. The "single medical finding of interest," writes former Pennsylvania Governor Raymond P. Shafer in his
foreword to the book, "is the indication of functional hypoxia among heavy, long-term chronic smokers." However,
he notes, ganja in Jamaica is customarily mixed with tobacco and ganja smokers are also generally heavy cigarette
smokers; hence it was impossible to distinguish between clinical effects of ganja and tobacco smoking and
cigarette smoking, the conclusion being that smoking per se may be responsible for impairment of respiratory
efficiency. Again pointing up culture as the crucial variable in the use and effects of a drug was the finding that, as
Governor Shafer notes, in contrast to the alleged "amotivational" effects generally attributed to marihuana in the
United States, in Jamaica ganja "serves to fulfill values of the work ethic."

17
If that suspicion were unfounded, would we not be more worried about the effects of
nicotine than about those of THC? And, while by no means underrating the seriousness of
the heroin threat, would we not be less agitated over an estimated quarter million heroin
addicts, and adopt more intelligent social policies to deal with the problem (including even
such "unthinkable" alternatives to the black-market drug empire as legalized heroin
maintenance) than by the truly epidemic proportions of alcoholism? Against three to four
hundred thousand opiate addicts in the United States (certainly a shocking figure) there are
nevertheless ten to twelve million confirmed alcoholics and millions more "problem drinkers"
with enormous potential for harm to themselves and society. Whatever the personal and
social damage of heroin addiction and its functional relationship to street crime and
corruption, there is a demonstrable correlation between drinking and many thousands of
annual highway deaths, as well as homicide, child abuse, and other violence, with a total
social cost immeasurably higher than that attributable to heroin. Moreover, as Brecher
(1972) and others have shown, excessive use of alcohol carries far greater potential than
heroin for organic deterioration. This is not to advocate heroin over alcohol, certainly, nor to
minimize the tragedy which heroin addiction represents for so many individuals and their
families, but only to underscore that in disregard of everything we know of alcohol as a
dangerous drug, "getting high" with it carries but a fraction of the social and legal stigma we
as a society attach to other mind-altering substances. Facts, then, are seemingly
irrelevant—at least they are less relevant or decisive than cultural conditioning.

18
1. "Idolatry," Hallucinogens, And Cultural Survival
Almost as soon as Europeans set foot on American soil at the end of the fifteenth century,
first in the Antilles and soon afterwards on the continent itself, they took note with varying
degrees of fascination and revulsion of a strange indigenous custom they were later to
recognize as an indispensable aspect of aboriginal religion and ritual in many parts of the
New World: ecstatic intoxication with different plants to which the native peoples ascribed
supernatural power, and which the Spaniards, not surprisingly, associated with the Devil's
untiring effort to impede the victory of Christianity over traditional Indian religion.
In a sense they were right: the missionary clergy correctly perceived the sacred
mushrooms, morning-glory seeds, peyote, snuffs, tobacco, and other "magical" (that is,
consciousness-transforming) plants as obstacles to total conversion, since their continued
use, in secret and under the constant threat of the most cruel punishment, from public
flogging to burning alive at the stake, served to confirm and validate the traditional
symbolic and religious world views of some of the aboriginal peoples and to consolidate
resistance against their total destruction. And in fact, as ecclesiastical writers of later
centuries were forced to admit, the great expenditure of missionary zeal, the preaching, and
the punishment seemed in the end to have accomplished little more than to drive these
practices underground, where they were even harder to combat. Or else the Indians had
managed to work peyote, morning-glory seeds, and other sacred plants so subtly into
Christian doctrine and ritual that they could lay claim to practicing proper respect for the
Virgin Mary and the saints even while continuing to seek spiritual guidance with the aid of
the divine inebriants of the pre-European past. The Spaniards, of course, saw this
combination as clever deceit; which in a way it was—in defense of the integrity of the
traditional culture; on the other hand, such synthesis of Christian with pre-Conquest belief
and ritual was an expectable consequence of culture contact and acculturation.
It is important to note that the early missionary fathers more often than not were content to
accept as true the reports they heard from the Indians of the wondrous effects of the
magical plants, especially in connection with divination and curing, the two areas in which
the native hallucinogens played their most important role. What they seem to have objected
to primarily—apart from their aversion to any kind of intoxication among their Indian
charges—was that Christ was missing from the system; for that reason the supernatural
effects could only be explained in terms of the Devil, who unceasingly tried to maintain and
enlarge his ancient hold on the native souls whose salvation the Spaniards were convinced
was their divine mission. Hemando Ruiz de Alarcon, a seventeenth-century divine who was
commissioned by his bishop to investigate and uproot whatever indigenous belief and ritual
had survived the first century of Spanish rule in Morelos and adjacent parts of central
Mexico, devoted much of his Tratado of 1629 to Indian worship and use of the sacred
morning glories, peyote, mushrooms, and tobacco, expressing the fear that these ancient
"idolatrous" practices of the Indians might prove attractive enough to spread to the lower
strata of Spanish colonial society.

19
The earliest European accounts of ritual intoxication date from the initial voyages of
discovery toward the end of the fifteenth century. One Fray Ramón Pane was commissioned
by Christopher Columbus, on his second voyage in 1496, to observe and set down the
ceremonies and "antiquities" of the Arawakan-speaking Taino Indians on the island of
Hispaniola, whom even the Spaniards recognized as a notably gentle people with an
advanced culture (which, however, was soon to decline disastrously in response to
European cruelties and previously unknown diseases). Pane described rites in which the
natives inhaled an intoxicating herb they called kohobba,* "so strong that those who take it
lose consciousness" and believe themselves to be in communication with the supernatural
world. The Indians snuffed the potent powder through foot-long tubes, he reported, and
"sorcerers" (i.e. shamans or curers) customarily took the drug along with their patients so
as to learn the cause of the affliction and its proper treatment. The same sort of direct
psychic bond between healer and patient is still common in drug-assisted folk therapy in
Mexico as well as Peru.
In the first decades of the sixteenth century, the Spanish conquerors of Mexico found the
Indians there in possession of a considerable psychoactive pharmacopoeia that included
several kinds of sacred mushrooms, peyote, Datura (a genus that may not have been
unfamiliar to the invaders since it also played a role in medieval European medicine and
witchcraft), an especially potent species of tobacco called picietl, and a variety of other
native plants with strangely "otherworldly" effects whose chemistry has only recently been
clarified. Prominent among the latter are certain species of morning glories whose
psychedelic seeds were held especially sacred—to the point of divinity—by the Aztecs and
by peoples of central Mesoamerica, and whose active principles the scientific world was
surprised to learn only a few years ago are closely allied to the synthetic hallucinogen LSD-
25.
Nor was it different in South America. All across the continent, from the small-scale
societies of tropical-forest manioc planters and hunters and collectors of wild foods to the
complex civilization of the Incas in the Andes, the early explorers and missionaries found
the drug-induced ecstatic trance—what we now call transformation of consciousness—to be
an integral aspect of shamanistic religion. As we now know, the Indians of South America
even more than those in Mesoamerica not only discovered and experimented with the
psychoactive properties of many plants in their different environments, but also successfully
tried combinations of unrelated species for the purpose of activating their psychedelic
principles or heightening their effects.

*
Kohobba, whose use died out in the Antilles after the Conquest, along with hundreds of thousands of the native
population, was made from the seeds of an acacia-like tree, Anadenanthera peregrina, which are rich in
tryptamines and from which a number of Indian tribes in northeastern South America still prepare their intoxicating
snuffs. Initially, however—indeed, until the early twentieth century—kohobba was generally identified with tobacco,
an understandable error since tobacco was, and continues to be, used in similar ways elsewhere in South America.
It is even possible that kohobba or a closely related word was also applied to intoxicating snuffs based mainly on
tobacco.

20
For the native inhabitants in its path, the military, economic, and spiritual conquest of South
America was—as it has continued to be in such areas as Amazonia—an almost unrelieved
tragedy. Nor did it have the benefit of a Las Casas crying out for justice for the Indians, or
even the painstaking kind of ethnography that is the Mexican legacy of Fray Bernardino de
Sahagun, a remarkable sixteenth-century Franciscan who, like a few other churchmen of his
time, was blessed with an insatiable and even largely sympathetic curiosity that caused him
to compile for posterity all he could learn from Aztec informants of the native civilization
that the Spaniards, himself included, had come to destroy. Sahagun's Florentine Codex and
other writings include an impressive array of herbal lore which, together with the botanical
and medicinal compilations of his learned contemporary, the royal physician Francisco
Hernandez, is the indispensable starting point for any botanical, taxonomical, or
ethnographic investigation of the sacred hallucinogens. The beautifully illustrated mid-
sixteenth-century Aztec herbal known as the Codex Badianus may also have been composed
under the auspices or inspiration of Sahagun. For the century following the Conquest, the
treatises of Jacinto de la Sema and of Ruiz de Alarcon are essential for an understanding of
the continued functions of traditional hallucinogens, especially tobacco, morning glories,
peyote, and mushrooms, during the early Colonial period, and the ways in which these were
affected by, or managed to evade, the processes of culture change and Christian
acculturation.
Although there are references in the Colonial literature to ritual intoxication by means of
plants, for South America the pre-nineteenth-century sources are not very satisfactory, and
apart from Alexander von Humboldt's identification and discussion of one of the two major
sources of hallucinogenic snuff on the Orinoco, there is little that could be called scientific. It
is in fact no exaggeration to state that practically everything we know today of the botany,
taxonomy, chemistry, and even anthropology of the ritual hallucinogens of South America
ultimately had its genesis in the work of the modern ethno-botanists—from the
Yorkshireman plant explorer Richard Spruce to Harvard's Richard Evans Schultes. Spruce in
1851 collected and named the first specimens of Banisteriopsis caapi, which he identified as
the source of the intoxicating drink of Upper Amazonian Indians. Schultes's field research in
the American tropics and in Mexico since the late 1930's has directly or indirectly led to the
botanical, chemical and cultural identification of most of the vegetal hallucinogens of the
New World, a task that is nonetheless not yet complete and will undoubtedly continue for
years to come.

21
2: Tobacco: "Proper Food Of The Gods"
The Spanish clergy from the first classified tobacco alongside peyote, morning glories, and
mushrooms as a ritual intoxicant of traditional Indian culture. This fact may come as a
surprise, but the ministers of the Colonial church knew whereof they spoke.
The natural and cultural history of tobacco (Nicotiana spp.) as an aboriginal American
cultigen—as much unknown to the rest of the world less than 500 years ago as were
chocolate, maize, and rubber—is too complex and too extensive to fit into these pages. But
we can hardly ignore it in the present context, not so much because as used by us today it
is potentially one of the most physiologically damaging substances known, but rather
because in much of the traditional Indian world tobacco was and still is considered to be the
special gift of the gods to humanity, given to assist mankind in bridging the gulf between
"this" world and "the other"—the world of the gods themselves. In many cases this view
involves employing tobacco to attain precisely the kinds of mystical states, or the
characteristically shamanistic ecstatic trance, that we commonly associate only with the
better recognized vegetal hallucinogens. To mention only one example from Mexico: not
only before the Conquest but centuries later the curing shamans of Aztec-speaking
communities used picietl (Nicotiana rustica), in conjunction with chants of certain origin
myths, to place themselves in what we might call "mythic time"—a time when everything
was possible—and to enlist the supernatural power of the creator gods and their primordial
handiwork in the restoration of the patient's health and equilibrium. This use is about as far
removed from hedonistic smoking as one can get. We will have occasion to refer to this
particular Aztec phenomenon again in another chapter.
Such things did not escape the attention of the Spanish chroniclers, and should have led to
many detailed investigations since, but in the modern ethnographic literature a recent study
of tobacco intoxication and shamanism, with its underlying mythological and cosmological
complex, among the Warao Indians of Venezuela (Wilbert, 1972) is literally the only
competent in-depth treatment of this important topic.

23
Gods and Men as Tobacco Addicts
I do not wish to imply that tobacco was universally employed to trigger alternate states of
consciousness. On the contrary, it probably served a greater variety of sacred purposes
than any other plant in the New World, among its most important and virtually universal
functions being that of divine sustenance for the gods, mainly in the form of smoke; it also
served as an indispensable adjunct of shamanic curing, primarily as a supernaturally
charged fumigant but sometimes also as a panacea. Yet there seems to have been at least
an element of incipient intoxication in shamanistic smoking in many Indian societies of
North and South America, and real tobacco intoxication, to the point of a radical altering of
consciousness or psychedelic trance, was certainly of considerable importance in the
ecstatic complex of the New World as a whole. This element, together with what we know
today of the chemical activity of Nicotiana, justifies assigning tobacco—as the Indians
themselves did—to the psychedelic flora, but with this important difference: in contrast to
the plants that we usually call hallucinogens, of which not a single species has been known
to be addictive, tobacco may be so. There seems to be no scientific reason to doubt, and
more than enough evidence to suggest (including observations among and testimony by
South American Indians) that tobacco is not just psychologically habituating, as some have
maintained, but that it does in fact result in physical dependency—i.e., is addictive in the
true sense of the word, a fact that many Indian populations recognized and codified in their
mythologies, even to the point of assigning to their gods the same physical and
psychological craving for tobacco they observed in their shamans, themselves archetypically
the mythmakers. Anthropologist Johannes Wilbert (personal communication) notes that
various North and South American Indian societies share a tradition that in giving tobacco
to the people the supernaturals failed to hold any back for themselves ("not even one pipe,"
the Fox quote the Gentle Manitou). Inasmuch as the gods crave tobacco as their essential
spirit food (usually though not always or everywhere in the form of smoke), by this act of
generosity they could be said to have placed themselves in a position of dependency,
subject to manipulation by religious practitioners. However, since the people likewise
depend on the good will of the supernaturals, the relationship was one of reciprocity and
interdependency, differing fundamentally from Judeo-Christian concepts. Because of the
similarity of tobacco rituals and beliefs in widely separated areas of aboriginal North and
South America, Wilbert thinks they diffused long ago from a common point of origin along
with the first plants themselves.
Edward Brecher et al. (1972) having adequately dealt with the problem of tobacco addiction
in the context of contemporary American society (pp. 209-244), there is no need to dwell
on it here. What concerns us, rather, is the traditional use of Nicotiana as a ritual and very
sacred inebriant, concerning which some Indians were, and are, well aware of its tendency
to addict, even if they did not phrase it in quite those terms.

24
The genus Nicotiana belongs, with Datura ("Jimsonweed") and such important food plants
as the tomato and potato, to the nightshade or potato family (Solanaceae), which also
includes a number of important narcotic genera, such as Atropa (A. belladonna). There may
be as many as 45 different species of tobacco, most of them the result of cultivation, but
only a few achieved wide pre-European dissemination. The most prominent of these are N.
tabacum, which may have originated as a cultivated hybrid of two other species in the
eastern valleys of the Bolivian Andes, spreading from there across northern South America
into the West Indies and to lowland Mexico, and N. rustica, another cultivated hybrid that is
found from the Andes to Canada, rivaling maize in its pre-European distribution. In the
Great Basin of western North America, particularly in California and the adjacent Nevada
and Arizona desert, three other species, N. bigelovi Watson, N. attenuata, and N.
trigonophylla, were the important tobaccos in native ritual. N. glauca Graham, the so-called
"tree tobacco" that is found growing all over the foothills on the Pacific coast of California, is
a comparatively recent import from South America that was apparently never employed by
California Indians in aboriginal times (Zigmond, 1941).
Although other alkaloids may contribute to the psychedelic aspects of Nicotiana intoxication,
the most important active principle is nicotine, a pyridine alkaloid that occurs in the
aboriginal species in much higher concentrations (up to four times) than in modern cigarette
tobacco. It is nicotine that produces the craving for tobacco in confirmed smokers, as it
does among Indians who use it in great amounts for ritual rather than pleasure. The
nicotine content of TV. rustica is significantly greater than that of N. tabacum, which, along
with the fact that N. rustica is also the hardier of the two species and requires less attention
in cultivation, probably accounts for its far more extensive geographical and cultural
distribution. In any event, being more powerful, N. rustica was much more widely employed
in metaphysical and therapeutic contexts. It was the sacred picietl of Aztec ritual and
medicine, also the divine tobacco of the Indians of the eastern Woodlands and also,
probably, the petum of aboriginal Brazil. Today, secular smoking of commercial tobacco for
pleasure, wholly unknown in the Americas in pre-European times, is probably general
among most Indian populations, excepting those in the remote interior of South America.
Nevertheless, the aboriginal Indian tobaccos have nowhere passed into secular use. Even
many relatively acculturated Indians who participate to one or another degree in the
national economy still make a distinction between white man's tobacco and their own.
Commercial cigarettes or cigars may be freely smoked at any time (and are sometimes
even used ceremonially), but the powerful N. rustica continues to be everywhere reserved
for traditional metaphysical and therapeutic purposes. This differentiation is also
emphasized in the terms applied to the traditional species. For example, the Huichols of
Mexico refer to N. rustica as "the proper tobacco of the shaman," while the Seneca of New
York call it oyengwe onwe, "real tobacco." At the same time, it seems that some Indians,
the Huichols included, are aware that N. rustica is not without danger; among the Huichols
there are even reports of imbibers of tobacco infusion falling ill with what is apparently
nicotine poisoning. There are also stories of peyote pilgrims dying after a tobacco
purification ordeal in the course of the quest for peyote. Considering the very high nicotine
content of N. rustica, occasional accidents of this sort are certainly possible.

25
The importance of tobacco in Huichol shamanism is especially interesting because it is yet
another example of the functional and symbolic coexistence of tobacco with a sacred
hallucinogen, in this case peyote. The shaman to whom tobacco is said to belong is not only
the actual shaman of a particular group but also the principal deity, the "First Shaman," Our
Grandfather, the deified fire, who established tobacco as well as the peyote ritual, and to
whom N. rustica is ceremonially sacrificed, not only in the peyote rites but in all other
ceremonies. Furthermore, tobacco smoke is as essential to shamanic curing among the
Huichols as it is everywhere else in American Indian shamanism. Huichol shamans "with a
bad heart"—i.e. in their malevolent role, as sorcerers—also use tobacco to speed "arrows of
sickness" to their victims, a phenomenon of which we will hear again shortly. My Huichol
informants say that evil shamans have their own special tobacco, which may or may not be
true in the literal sense, but which in any case reminds one of a Carib Indian tradition of a
mythological contest between a good and a bad shaman. At one point the good shaman
challenges his rival to reveal all the kinds of tobacco he has, and when the other fails to
enumerate more than ten, shows him up by magically producing many more varieties of his
own (Koch-Grunberg, 1923:213-214).
Tobacco also enters into the contest between the Young Lords or Hero Twins in the Popol
Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiche Maya of highland Guatemala, and the rulers of the
Underworld. The latter challenge their visitors from the Upperworld to keep two cigars lit
through the night. The Hero Twins pass the test by placing fireflies at the tips of their cold
cigars, only pretending to smoke incessantly, and relighting their still fresh cigars in the
morning, a feat that mystifies the rulers of the dead. As a matter of fact, the Tzotzil Maya of
Chiapas, Mexico, still believe that tobacco shields one from the evil beings of the
Underworld and from death, and the Lacandon Maya of the Usumacinta region even now
offer the first tobacco harvested to their gods in the form of cigars (Thompson, 1970).
Similar practices and traditions abound all over the Americas.

The Antiquity of Tobacco in America

How ancient is tobacco in the New World? Its spectacular aboriginal distribution and the
striking similarity of tobacco ideology suggest that it is very old indeed. It is entirely
possible that the progenitors of N. rustica and N. tabacum are the most ancient cultivated
plants in the Americas, older even than the earliest varieties of maize and other native
American food plants, whose initial domestication in southeastern Mexico dates to ca. 4000-
5000 BC There is of course no reason why the first cultigens should not have been intended
to feed the spirit rather than the stomach. In any event, tubular stone pipes, probably
(though not certainly) for tobacco smoking, rivaling in age the earliest primitive Mexican
maize, have been found in California—and smoking is not even believed to be among the
oldest methods of tobacco use! By the time of Columbus there was virtually no Indian
population, from Canada to southern South America, to whom one or another of the major
species of tobacco was not sacred and that did not either cultivate it or obtain it by trade
from their neighbors. This was true as much for societies that also used other psychoactive
species as for those that did not. Not only did Nicotiana enjoy a far wider geographical and
cultural distribution than any other vegetal hallucinogen, but it was also consumed in many
more ways and for many different purposes, from shamanic intoxication to feeding the
gods, to curing. Best-known and probably most common is smoking, but it was also drunk,
snuffed, licked, sucked, eaten, and even injected rectally as enemas, a technique that
permits especially rapid absorption of the active principles into the blood stream, while
bypassing the digestive system and thereby avoiding unpleasant side effects.

26
Psychedelic Enemas?
The rubber enema syringe is actually a South American Indian invention, but other suitable
materials were also employed for the bulb. Intoxicating as well as medicinal enemas have
been described both in the earliest European accounts of native customs, dating to the
sixteenth century, and in the more recent ethnographic literature. Tobacco juice, ayahuasca
(Banisteriopsis caapi), and even a species of Anadenanthera (A. colubrina) whose seeds
(huiica or wilka) were used for hallucinogenic snuff and in intoxicating beverages, all seem
to have been employed for enemas in western South America. Very early Quechua
dictionaries mention huiica syringes, and the sixteenth-century chronicler Poma de Ayala
(1936) likewise reports enemas made from these potent hallucinogenic seeds among the
Inca. Enema syringes also appear in the pictorial art of the Moche civilization, which
predates the Incas by more than a thousand years. Sahagun mentions enemas in Aztec
medicine, but does not tell us the purpose for which they were employed. Not so the
Anonymous Conqueror (1917), another sixteenth-century Mexican source, who writes of the
Huastec Indians of Veracruz that, not content with intoxicating themselves by drinking their
"wine" (actually pulque, the fermented juice of the agave cactus), they also injected it
rectally.
It has only recently come to light that the ancient Maya, too, employed enemas. Enema
syringes or narcotic clysters, and even enema rituals, were discovered to be represented in
Maya art, an outstanding example being a large painted vase dating AD 600-800, on which
a man is depicted carrying an enema syringe, applying an enema to himself, and having a
woman applying it to him. As a result of this newly discovered scene, archaeologist M. D.
Coe was able to identify a curious object held by a jaguar deity on another painted Maya
vessel as an enema syringe. If the enemas of the ancient Maya were, like those of Peruvian
Indians, intoxicating or hallucinogenic, they might have been compounds of fermented
balche (honey mead), itself a very sacred beverage, fortified with tobacco or with morning-
glory-seed infusions. Of course they could also have been a tobacco infusion alone.
The suggestion that the ritual enemas of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica were in fact not just
medicinal or therapeutic in our sense but, like those of the Incas, were meant to affect the
user's state of consciousness and place him in touch with the supernaturals, is supported
not just by the sixteenth-century and later evidence from South America but also by the
recent discovery of peyote enemas among the Huichols of the western Sierra Madre in
Mexico (Timothy Knab, personal communication). The Huichol syringe is made of the femur
of a small deer, with a bulb of deer bladder instead of rubber, closely resembling Plains
Indian deer-bone enema syringes in the collections of the Museum of the American Indian in
New York. Huichols say shamans who take a peyote infusion rectally instead of by mouth
(whole or ground in a specially consecrated mortar) do so because their stomachs are weak
and cannot tolerate the very bitter and astringent plant, which often causes nausea and
even severe vomiting; however, I suspect that inasmuch as the sacred cactus is itself
equated with, and identified as, deer (see Chapters 10 and 11), the practice probably has
deeper symbolic meaning.

27
The tobacco enema is presumably a relatively recent refinement in the history of nicotine
ecstasies, while the drinking of tobacco in the form of a syrupy infusion may be among the
earliest. The juice, produced by steeping or boiling of the leaves, can either be taken by
mouth or imbibed through the nostrils, in which case the active principles are absorbed
more quickly into the system. Tobacco drinking to induce the desired trance state, often in
great amounts and after prolonged periods of fasting, was and is especially common in
shamanic initiation among Amazonian Indians, where it is often followed by the neophyte's
first introduction to the ritual Banisteriopsis caapi beverage, whose most important active
principles are harmala alkaloids. Tobacco infusions, imbibed through the nostrils, are also
well-integrated in the symbolic system and psychopharmacology of drug-assisted folk
therapy in urban Peru, where, for example the healer administers it both to his patients and
to himself in conjunction with the mescaline-containing San Pedro cactus (Sharon, 1972).
More or less rapid intoxication by eating raw or prepared tobacco, or by snuffing, or more
gradual intoxication by sucking, are probably also very old. Snuffing is common, especially
in South America, where pulverized tobacco, mixed with wood ashes or some other alkaline
preparation to facilitate release of the active principles, is inhaled either alone or in
combination with some other psychoactive species. What is often called chewing in the
literature should more properly be described as sucking, since the quids prepared of
powdered or crumbled tobacco and lime (or ashes) are not actually chewed but held in the
mouth, between the gums and the teeth, and sucked for hours, allowing the juice to trickle
down the throat. This technique of gradual nicotine intoxication was aboriginally so
widespread, from the Northwest Coast of North America through California deep into
Amazonia, that it must surely rank among the earliest methods. It is still the common
practice among the Yanomamo (Shiriana, Waika) of the Upper Orinoco as well as other
aboriginal populations of tropical South America. Significantly, the Yanomamo, who also
employ powerful intoxicating tryptamine snuffs in their shamanistic rituals, apparently can
and do go for long periods without snuffing but say they suffer physical discomfort if they
are deprived of their tobacco quids for even short periods of time (Chagnon et al., 1971).
Powdered tobacco mixed with lime in the form of a quid or cud is also one of several ways in
which Nicotiana was and is used among both the highland and lowland Maya, as it was
throughout Middle America (Thompson, 1970). The early literature lists alleviation of
fatigue, hunger, and thirst, and also ritual intoxication among the principal reasons for the
practice.

The Sacred Pipe

Considering its enormous geographic spread in the Americas at the time of European
discovery, as well as the probable age of stone tobacco pipes in California, the inhaling
(often called "drinking" or "eating") of tobacco smoke by the shaman, as a corollary to
therapeutic fumigation and the feeding of the gods with smoke, must also be of
considerable antiquity. Tobacco was and still is smoked by shamans and other participants
in shamanic ritual in many different ways—as cigarettes and cigars with wrappings of corn
husk or other plant materials, of which some may well have been themselves psycho-active;
in cane tubes up to three feet in length; or in tubular or elbow pipes of varying design and
of different materials. Such pipes were often of simple construction, but others, especially in
North America, were frequently real works of art on which much care and ritual was
lavished, representing humans, animals, or supernatural beings and activities associated
with the "medicine" or spirit power of their owners. Simple or complex, however, the
manufacture of the pipe never was solely a matter of technology. It was a sacred art, often
an elaborate ceremonial lasting over many days, fully commensurate with the divine nature
of tobacco and the metaphysical purposes for which the pipe was intended. Perhaps the
following, summarized from a description of pipe manufacture among the Navaho (Tschopik,
1941) will help us appreciate this better:

28
While a pipe is made, no one may talk or laugh and great care is taken that nothing be
broken. Pipes may be made by either men or women, who are usually specialists in this art.
Both must observe strict rules about handling of their tools and other objects; for example,
tools may be passed only between thumb and index finger and in no other manner. A pipe
maker usually makes two pipes at a time, and if a man and a woman are both making
pipes, two pairs are produced (this relates to Navaho insistence on male-female balance and
balance in general). The pipe maker generally makes a black, crooked, conical male pipe
that is used in hunting rituals, and a white, straight, conical female pipe which is employed
in the Blessing Way ceremony. Pipes are made from clay which deer, antelope, elk,
jackrabbits, or prairie dogs have chewed in order to extract salt. The water used for mixing
the clay likewise has a mystical bond with deer, for plants that have been knocked down by
deer while feeding are soaked in it before it is added to the clay. The paste is rolled out
between the palms of the hands and modeling is done with the fingers. The pipe is
smoothed with a wooden scraping tool and saliva produced as the maker chews "deer
medicine." The pipe is bent into the desired shape and perforated longitudinally while the
clay is still soft.
When it is finished the maker—whether man or woman—must sing four songs (four being
the sacred number), after which the pipes are decorated with bits of stone or shell, in
recognition of the materials with which the gods made the first tobacco pipes. Then, after
more songs have been sung, the pipes receive names. Navaho pipes are dried for four days,
either inside the hogan or in the crotch of a tree. If a dog should urinate on the drying pipes
they cannot be used in any ceremony. During the drying period the makers must take sweat
baths and wash their clothing.
The finished and dried pipe is fired in a small pit that is specially dug. A flat rock is placed at
the bottom and the pipe laid on it with the bowl end facing east. Only one pipe at a time is
fired. It is covered with tinder and the fire is allowed to bum down to ashes before the pipe
is removed. The ashes are cooled with water, a ritual act believed to bring rain. Four more
days of ceremonies must pass before the pipe can be painted. If four pipes have been
made, each is painted with a different color, representing one of the four sacred directions
and one of the sexes—i.e. a black male pipe stands for east, a white female pipe for north,
a yellow male pipe for west and a blue female pipe for south. (Tschopik, 1941:56-62)

29
Tobacco Shamanism among the Warao
As a fitting conclusion to our consideration of tobacco as a divine—but addictive—inebriant,
and by way of introduction to the psychedelic flora as a whole, let us look briefly at the
tobacco ideology of the Warao, a Venezuelan Indian society that at least until the most
recent times managed to escape the destructive effects of acculturation and maintain its
highly successful traditional lifeway as riverine fishermen in the delta of the Orinoco. As
Wilbert (1972:55-83) tells us, the Warao, of whom there are more than 10,000, use no
other hallucinogen but tobacco. More than that, their astonishingly complex metaphysical
universe is quite literally held together and sustained by tobacco smoke, through the agency
of their shamans, who smoke incessantly to fulfill the primordial promise to the gods that
there be abundant tobacco smoke as their proper and only food and as the shaman's means
of communication with the Otherworld. The shaman's cigar is a long and slender cane tube,
up to two feet in length, filled with powerful charges of tightly rolled leaves of black tobacco
that is perfumed with a fragrant resin to make it attractive to the gods. In the course of
shamanizing, shamans may smoke ten, twenty, thirty, and even more of these giant cigars,
never exhaling but "eating" the smoke until it suffuses their entire system. So "lightened"
by tobacco, the shamans ascend in their ecstatic trances to the zenith and travel to their
respective master spirits on celestial bridges constructed of tobacco smoke, as are the
houses to which they retire after death. A curing shaman's tobacco smoke is therapeutic,
but in their negative role these shamans can also speed projectiles of sickness and death to
their victims with the aid of powerful blasts from their reversed cigars.
For the novice shaman the most crucial undertaking of his life is his initiatory tobacco
trance, when, after a long fast and instruction by the master shaman, speeded upward by
the smoke of his sacred cigar, he at last embarks upon a journey that takes him to the ends
of the Warao universe. Along the way he must travel on slippery paths across a yawning
defile, evade the knives of demons, the snapping beaks and talons of raptorial birds, and
the jaws of alligators and other terrifying creatures, until at the moment of greatest rapture,
having successfully negotiated the final obstacle of clashing gates, he is wafted, "buoyant as
a puff of cotton," toward his celestial encounter with the supreme spirit in the House of
Tobacco Smoke.
Awakening from his tobacco trance, the novice shaman feels newborn, confident of the truth
of the ancient traditions because they have been validated by his own ecstatic experience.
The new shaman and the tobacco medicine powder that has lodged in his chest are still
feeble and tender, but after a month of eating little, avoiding certain odors, and smoking
incessantly, he grows strong, ready to take his place as one of the guardians of his
community's physical and metaphysical integrity.
But like all shamans, he will always need tobacco and will experience great physical and
psychological distress when tobacco is in short supply. Then his people will say, "Our
shaman is sick, he craves tobacco."
In his book, Maya History and Religion (1970), the great English Maya scholar J. Eric S.
Thompson devotes an entire chapter to the meaning and uses of the divine tobacco among
the May a and their neighbors, from which I wish only to quote the summation (pp. 122-
123) as peculiarly pertinent to all that was said above:

30
 This review makes clear the extent to which the taking of tobacco in every
form permeated Indian life in ancient Middle America. The attitude of noble,
priest, and commoner was imbued at times with something approaching
mysticism, as when tobacco was personified or even deified or when it was
accepted as an ally fighting beside man to overcome fatigue or pain or to
ward off so many ills of the human flesh. There is deep beauty there which
we, in our materialistic world, bombarded with advertising on television and in
print of some young man lighting a girl's cigarette as a prelude to conquest,
are unable to share or even to perceive. The relationship is that of compline
to a blast of the Beatles and their sad imitators.
Aside from the fact that in the meantime cigarette advertising has been banned from
television and that one can think of lots worse than the Beatles to set against the Night
Song, no one could have said it better.

31
3: Cannabis (Spp.) And Nutmeg Derivatives
With upward of a hundred species thus far botanically and chemically identified in the
psychoactive pharmacopoeia of different peoples of the world, the great majority of them in
the Americas, it is nonetheless a fact that there are many more potential hallucinogens in
the plant kingdom than have ever been discovered or utilized. The plant world is so
enormous that not even all its members have been classified, with estimates ranging up to
800,000 for the total number of species in the floras of the two hemispheres. The
hallucinogens among them are concentrated mainly in two families: (1) The fungi—from the
primitive Claviceps, the ergot parasite of rye and other Old World grasses, to the sacred
mushrooms of Mesoamerican Indians and the spectacularly beautiful Amanita muscaria, or
fly-agaric, of Eurasian shamanism. (2) The angiosperms, that vast family of plants whose
seeds are enclosed in an ovary. In contrast, the gymnosperms, comprising seed plants with
naked seeds not enclosed in an ovary (such as the conifers); ferns; lichens; algae; bacteria;
and bryophytes (nonflowering plants with rhizoids instead of true roots, comprising the
mosses and liverworts), all seem to be lacking in psychedelically active members (Schultes,
1972a).
The hallucinogenic properties themselves can be ascribed to two broad groups—nitrogenous
and non-nitrogenous (i.e. lacking a nitrogen atom). Of these two groups, the former,
comprising mainly alkaloids closely related to the amino acids (the building blocks of
proteins) and derived in their majority from the indolic amino acid tryptophane, plays by far
the greater role. Among these alkaloids, the tryptamines are the most important
hallucinogens (Schultes, 1970, 1972a). Interestingly enough, the nitrogenous compounds
are cosmopolitan while the non-nitrogenous compounds, classified into two main divisions,
the dypenzopyrans, which include the cannabinols in marihuana and hashish (Cannabis
spp.), and the phenylpropenes, found in nutmeg (Myristica fragrans), are strictly Old World.
There is still a third group, comprising the alcohols, but these are beyond the scope of this
book, even though alcohol is of course a drug and is in fact widely employed for ritual
intoxication, rather like the vegetal hallucinogens.*

Cannabis spp.
The literature on the hemp plant, Cannabis, scientific and popular, is such that we need
hardly add to it here. Also, strictly speaking, its best-known modern product, marihuana,
the "new social drug," is not a psychedelic but an euphoriant. But there is some significant
new information on the genus Cannabis that has not been widely disseminated. Moreover,
the active principles of Cannabis are perfectly capable of psychedelic effect, and have been
so used through history, especially in Asia, probably long before hemp fiber began to
assume economic importance.

*
Schultes (1970) mentions an alcohol-containing plant, Lagochilus inebrians, whose leaves and other parts have
long been used to brew an intoxicating tea by such peoples of central Asia as the Tajik, Tartar, Turkoman, and
Uzbek. A crystalline material called lagochiline, isolated from the plant in 1945, was at first thought to be an
alkaloid, but recent studies have shown it to be a polyhydric alcohol.

33
A New Finding: Three Species of Cannabis
"Spp." is the conventional abbreviation for species in the plural. It may come as something
of a surprise that contrary to conventional wisdom Cannabis should be treated as a
multispecies genus rather than as a single species, Cannabis sativa L., with several
geographical or ecological varieties (e.g. C. mexicana, C. americana [gigantea}, and C.
indica) but not separate species. In this I follow a new determination by Schultes and his
colleagues (1974: 337-360), who have now accepted as correct the findings of Russian
plant geneticists in the 1920's and 1930's that Cannabis sativa is not alone but is only one
of three separate species, the others being C. indica and C. ruderalis. This differentiation is
by no means an idle taxonomical exercise, of significance only to a handful of botanists and
plant taxonomists. As Schultes and his coworkers point out, considering the great economic
and therapeutic importance of this multipurpose plant to man since he first cultivated it
perhaps as much as 10,000 years ago, and the fact that the drug it yields continues to be
the focus of considerable controversy as well as medical experimentation, the time "is long
overdue when a full study of Cannabis taxonomy must be initiated" (p. 357). Moreover,
there is an intriguing legal aspect: much marihuana legislation, not only in the United States
but, largely because of American pressure, in other countries as well, is based precisely on
the single-species theory which Schultes and his colleagues now reject as scientifically
untenable.
That there is considerable variability in the strength of marihuana and other preparations of
Cannabis has long been generally known, to scientists as well as social users. A variety of
factors, particularly environmental ones, are usually cited to account for the phenomenon.
But Schultes et al. have become convinced that there are, in fact, significant chemical
differences between different species,
… not only in the cannabinolic content but in other constituents, such as the
essential oils, flavonoids and possibly several other classes of secondary
compounds. Lamarck suggested as early as 1783 that the content of the
intoxicating principle was higher in Cannabis indica than in C. sativa. In the
intervening 200 years, during which the epithet indica has been used, there
has usually been the inference that it is a more strongly intoxicating form of
Cannabis. Unfortunately, however, almost no chemical studies have been
made in association with taxonomic studies nor on the basis of voucher
specimens. Throughout the modern Russian literature there exists the
inference, if not outright claim, that the cannabinolic content of Cannabis
indica is higher than that of C. saliva and C. ruderalis. Pertinent to species
differentiation on a chemical basis may be the unexpected, recent discovery,
made independently by several workers, that chemical differences in
Cannabis appear to be based more on a genetic basis than on environmental
or edaphic factors. If this be so, then it may add still another argument for
specific differentiation in the genus. (Schultes et at., 1974:354-355)

34
Whatever the final taxonomic and phytochemical determinations, Cannabis, whose original
home is somewhere in central Asia, where its only truly wild representatives can now be
found and from where it diffused in early times to other parts of the Old World—and after
the Conquest, to the New World as well—is today adapted to almost all inhabited parts of
the globe, and virtually all climates, either as cultivated plants or as weeds that escaped
from cultivation. The literary, folkloric, historical, and archaeological evidence for its use in
ancient medicine and as a ritual intoxicant is extensive, beginning with what is generally
believed to be the earliest reference to the therapeutic value of Cannabis in a Chinese
treatise on pharmacology attributed to the legendary emperor Shen Nung and said to date
from 2737 BC (cf. Brecher et al., 1972; Emboden, 1972a). Cannabis actually had a wide
variety of medical uses in the United States between 1850 and 1937; it was listed as a
recognized medicinal drug in the United States Pharmacopoeia until 1942 and is still so
included in its British counterpart. Largely because of public or official hysteria over
recreational marihuana use, medical demand for Cannabis extracts was until recently very
low, but beginning in 1971 there has been a sharp upturn in experimental use of Cannabis
as medication for a variety of disorders, including alcoholism, heroin and amphetamine
dependence, emotional disturbance, and even glaucoma. (See Brecher et al., 1972.)

Nutmeg
Nutmeg, like mace a product of the fruit of the nutmeg tree, Myristica fragrans, has long
been a popular spice—and historically, an important medicament in Asia, the Near East, and
Europe—of which the United States alone consumes between five and six million pounds a
year, mainly as a food flavoring in baking and cooking. It is used especially in doughnuts,
and around Christmas time there is always a marked upsurge in its popularity as a savory
ingredient in eggnog and hot toddy.
Less well-known perhaps is the fact that in large doses nutmeg acts on the central nervous
system as an hallucinogenic intoxicant, though, let it be said at once, with bizarre physical
and mental symptoms and with such distinctly unpleasant after-effects as extreme nausea,
headache, dizziness, and dryness of the nose and throat. The psychoactive properties of
nutmeg, which have been noted by physicians since early times, present a whole series of
interesting cultural and psychopharmacological problems, especially since two of its
essential oils, safrol and myristicin, are the basis of two synthetic drugs, MDA and MMDA,
amphetamine derivatives that have become important in psychotherapy.
The ancient world is full of tales of nutmeg as a narcotic medicament with wondrous healing
properties for a great variety of ailments, from kidney disease to chronic irritability to
impotence. Unfortunately, as Weil (1967), who made a study of experimentation with
nutmeg intoxication among students and United States prison populations* has noted,
reliable historical data on nutmeg's being deliberately used as a psychoactive agent are
hard to come by, although there are a number of early accounts of the effects of nutmeg
intoxication, and the nutmeg is specifically referred to as a "narcotic fruit" in the Ashur
Veda, an early Hindu work dealing with medicine and the prolongation of human life.

*
Malcolm X, for example, describes his prison experience with nutmeg intoxication in his Autobiography (1964).

35
Nutmeg in European Medicine
Nutmeg achieved great importance in European medicine in the Middle Ages, but it was
apparently unknown to the Greeks and Romans. In fact, it does not seem to have reached
Europe until the first centuries of the Christian era, presumably through the agency of
Arabian spice traders. Arab physicians set down its numerous therapeutic applications as
early as the seventh century, but in Europe it is nowhere mentioned in literature until the
twelfth century, and its source, the Banda (Nutmeg) Islands in the East Indies, was to
remain unknown until the Portuguese reached them in 1512. It is not generally realized that
early exploration by the Portuguese and their European rivals was largely spurred by the
search for nutmeg and other precious spices of the Orient, which in those days were much
sought after not as condiments but as medicines, among them narcotics and aphrodisiacs as
well as panaceas. Nutmeg was, in fact, widely regarded as an effective aphrodisiac and still
enjoys that reputation in the Near East, where Yemenite men take it to enhance potency. It
is also still very much a part of the popular pharmacopoeias of Malaysia and India, where it
is prescribed for such ills as heart trouble, intestinal disorders, kidney disease, and even
irritability in children.
In European medicine nutmeg achieved its greatest fame in the 1700's, but with the advent
of modern medicine its popularity gradually diminished—until in the late nineteenth century
it made a sudden and dramatic comeback with a veritable epidemic of nutmeg intoxication
among American and British women who mistakenly thought large doses of the spice could
induce overdue menstruation and even abortion. According to Weil, this completely
erroneous idea, whose origins are a mystery, occasionally still surfaces in the United States.

Nutmeg and Psychotherapy

The two drugs mentioned above, MDA and MMDA, do not occur in nature. They are the
result of amination of the essential oils of nutmeg. If similar processes occur naturally in the
human body it would help to explain the subjective effects of nutmeg. MDA (methylene
dioxyamphetamine) is an amination product of safrol, and the closely related MMDA (3-
methoxy-4,5-methylene dioxyphenyl isopropylamine) is a synthetic compound derived from
the addition of ammonia to myristicin, the most important primary constituent of nutmeg.
Safrol is also present in other spices, most prominently in oil of sassafras, which consists
about 80 percent of safrol. In modest quantities sassafras oil serves as a flavoring, in larger
doses it has been used as a medicament, and of course sassafras tea has long been widely
enjoyed. Neither sassafras oil nor sassafras tea, however, have the reputation of nutmeg as
a psychoactive agent (Shulgin et al., 1967).

36
In a new book, The Healing Journey (1973), the Chilean-born psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo
has outlined some of his experiences with MDA- and MMDA-assisted psychotherapy.*
Naranjo calls these agents "feeling enhancers," and he differentiates them as psychedelic
("mind-manifesting") agents as distinguished from hallucinogens or psychotomimetics
because they do not result in extraordinary perceptual phenomena or depersonalization and
do not mimic psychotic states. In psychotherapy, he writes, MDA is valuable because it
characteristically induces what is called "age regression," a state in which the patient, while
retaining awareness of the present self, vividly reexperiences particular childhood events
and is able to verbalize these past experiences far more expressively than is the case with
other drugs that have been so used. While he calls MDA the "drug of analysis," capable of
returning the patient deep into his troubling past far more quickly than is usual with
traditional psychoanalysis and less traumatically than with LSD, MMDA induces ecstatic or
peak experiences of the here and now, again without the temporary disintegration of
personality and other drastic psychic effects that often accompany the use of LSD in
psychotherapy, creating instead
… an intensification of feelings, symptoms, and visual imagination rather than
a qualitative change thereof. The value of such an intensification in the
psychotherapeutic process lies mainly, perhaps, in that clues to the significant
issues take more frequently the therapist's and patient's attention than they
otherwise would, whereas, in the normal situation, much of the time and
effort in a therapeutic process may go into cutting through a veil of verbiage
and automatisms that form part of the habitual social role. With MMDA, there
is a more prompt access to the patient's underlying experience, or symptoms
resulting from its denial and distortion, (p. 122)

*
Notwithstanding his enthusiasm for the psychotherapeutie potential of MDA, Naranjo (p. 77) properly sounds this
word of caution: MDA has recently proved to be toxic to certain individuals and at varying dose levels; as is true of
chloroform, among other drugs, what may be a regular dose to most patients may prove fatal to some. Typical
warning signals of MDA are confusion, skin reactions, and profuse sweating. Hence, he writes, compatibility of
individual patients must be ascertained with progressively increasing test doses before commencing any
therapeutic MDA session.

37
4. Ibogaine And The Vine Of Souls: From Tropical Forest
Ritual To Psychotherapy
Naranjo's application of psychedelics to mental therapy at this point provides a convenient
pharmacological bridge for us, from the numerically small though significant non-
nitrogenous substances to the infinitely more numerous and culture-historically more
dramatic nitrogenous hallucinogens. Also, in contrast to the nutmeg derivatives MDA and
MMDA, which do not occur naturally but are the result of in vitro animation, ibogaine and
harmaline, the other two psychedelics which Naranjo found most useful, are very much in
evidence in the natural world itself—as are the tryptamines, ergolines, isoquinolines,
phenylethylamines, and tropanes in the major hallucinogens of the New World, or the
isoxazoles of the fly-agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria.
Ibogaine is derived from an equatorial African bush, Tabernanthe iboga, whose
hallucinogenic roots are employed in the Bwiti ancestor cult, the MBieri curing cult, and
other nativistic religious movements in tropical sub-Saharan West Africa. Harmaline is one
of the principal harmala alkaloids in Banisteriopsis caapi, the sacred vine of ecstatic
Amazonian shamanism, in related species of the Malphighiaceae, and in Peganum harmala,
an Old World plant known also as Syrian rue.

Tabernanthe iboga
Twelve closely related indole alkaloids have been isolated in T. iboga, a member of the
Apocynaceae, or dogbanes, a family consisting of tropical herbs, shrubs, and trees
characterized by a milky juice, often showy flowers, and simple entire leaves. T. iboga,
which occurs wild in the equatorial underforest but is also cultivated widely around villages
adhering to the cults, has yellowish or pinkish-white flowers and a small, sweetish-tasting,
non-narcotic fruit that is sometimes used as a medicine against barrenness. Although the
family as a whole is rich in alkaloids, T. iboga is the only member definitely known to be
used as an hallucinogen, with ibogaine apparently the principal psychoactive constituent
(Schultes, 1970).
Iboga or eboka has interested the Europeans since the 1800's, when its ritual use was first
reported by explorers of Gabon and the Congo. In the last decades of the nineteenth
century the German colonial administration of northern Gabon, then German Kamerun,
encouraged its use as a central stimulant on tiring marches and colonial labor projects.
French medical scientists studied ibogaine—now known to function as a monoamine oxidase
inhibitor in the brain—intensively around the turn of the century and adopted it into official
medicine as the first antidepressant of its kind, long before the advent of Tofranil,
iproniazide, and similar drugs. The first modern psychiatrist to adopt it on a sustained basis
as an adjunct to psychotherapy seems to have been Naranjo, who reported his initial results
with the drug in 1966. Since then, ibogaine has passed into wider psychiatric use, especially
in South America.
Because I want to devote more space in this chapter to the harmala alkaloids, whose
subjective effects in psychotherapy sometimes strikingly resemble those reported from the
aboriginal cultural context, the discussion of ibogaine will be limited to a summary of its role
in African cults (for a wider discussion of its application to psychiatry see Naranjo's The
Healing Journey, pp. 174-228).

39
Iboga Cults in Tropical Africa
The first significant modern anthropological examination of Tabernanthe iboga is that of
James W. Fernandez, who studied its role in the Bwiti and MBieri cults of the Fang of Gabon
in the larger context of reformist and nativistic African religious movements. What follows is
based on a paper published by him in 1972.*
In the Fang tongue T. iboga is called eboka. The principal active alkaloid is mainly
concentrated in the root bark, and it is this that the Fang employ for ecstatic inebriation, in
the form of raspings, ground up as powder or soaked in water and drunk as an infusion.
How much of the drug is consumed depends on the context. The regular way is to ingest
small doses of eboka (two to three teaspoonfuls for women and three to five for men) in
powdered form before and in the early hours of the ceremonies. The second way is to take
truly massive doses once or twice in the career of the cult member for the purpose of
initiation and to "break open the head" in order to effect contact with the ancestors. The
regular doses amount to about 20 grams in all, containing 75-125 mg. of ibogaine. This is
sufficient to bring about the desired ecstatic dream state in which one travels outside one's
body to Otherworlds, where the ancestors dwell and where one learns to do their work (as
distinct from the burdensome and psychologically disorienting demands of the rapidly
modernizing world outside the tropical rain forest). The massive initiatory dose is very much
greater, from forty to sixty times the threshold dose, when the effects make themselves
felt. However, in very high amounts eboka is toxic; not surprisingly, as in the toloache
(Datura inoxia or meteloides) initiation cults of Southern California Indians, and the red-
bean rites of the Southern Plains, overdose deaths from eboka have occasionally been
reported.†
How old is the use of T. iboga in equatorial Africa? That is difficult to estimate, but the Fang
themselves credit its origin to the Pygmy people of the Congolese rain forest, who were
there long before the Fang arrived from the north and who are, in fact regarded by them as
their saviors, having shown them how to survive in the unfamiliar and frightening forest
environment. Eboka, goes a Fang story recorded by Fernandez (pp. 245-246), was given to
the people by the last of the creator gods, Zame ye Mebege:
He saw the misery in which blackman was living. He thought how to help him.
One day he looked down and saw a blackman, the Pygmy Bitumu, high in an
Atanga tree, gathering its fruit. He made him fall. He died and Zame brought
his spirit to him. Zame cut off the little fingers and the little toes of the
cadaver of the Pygmy and planted them in various pans of the forest. They
grew into the eboka bush.

*
A recent article by H. Pope in Economic Botany (1969) also contains much valuable ethnobotanical and historic
data.
†
The Fang employ several other plants with hallucinogenic properties, but none plays the pervasive ritual role of
eboka. One is Alchornea floribunda, called alan. In large amounts alan produces a state that is interpreted as
passing over to the land of the ancestors. Some branches of the Bwiti cult mix alan and eboka. The latex of
Elaeophorbia drupifera is mixed with oil to form eyedrops that seem to affect the optic nerves, producing bizarre
visual effects. Yet another is hemp (Cannabis sp.), which in some branches of Bwiti is smoked after the ingestion of
two or three teaspoonfuls of eboka. The smoke symbolizes the travel of the soul to the roof of the Bwiti chapel,
where it mingles with the ancestors. Although hemp has long been smoked in Gabon, most branches of Bwiti reject
it as a foreign plant that distracts the members from proper ritual matters. Like South American Indians, Fang
women also make quids of tobacco and ashes which they hold in their cheeks or under the tongue and which are
said to produce a state of pleasant lassitude. (Femandez, 1972:242-243)

40
Eventually the dead man's wife came searching for him. She was told by a disembodied
voice to eat of the root of an eboka plant that grew at the left of the mouth of a cave, and
of a mushroom (!) that grew on the right. She did so and suddenly the bones of the dead
with which the cave was filled came to life, revealing themselves as her husband and other
deceased relatives. They told her that she had found the plant that from then on would
enable members of the Bwiti cult to see the dead.

Male-Female Symbolism and Acculturation

The mushroom of the origin myth is a white fungus with a large cap that is sometimes
consumed in the Bwiti cult and that also plays a role in herbal concoctions. No psychoactive
properties have been reported, but the mushroom has not been studied ethnobotanically or
chemically.
Fernandez points out several important elements in the myth. First, it clearly identifies the
eboka plant with the deep forest and the Pygmies as an agent of transition that enables the
people to pass from the familiar village deep into the dark and mysterious forest that holds
the secrets of death (recalling that the Fang themselves once made the traumatic transition
from the open savannah lands to the north into the equatorial rain forest). Second, there is
the universal image of the cave as the place of death and rebirth. Third, the story of the
discovery of eboka by the wife emphasizes the crucial role of women in the cult. While in
the MBieri curing cult women are dominant, in Bwiti men and women have an equal place.
However, the cult directs itself to the female principle of the universe: Nyingwan Mebege,
author of procreation and guarantor of a prosperous life. Fernandez also notes that Bwiti
eboka is the left-hand plant—the left side of the chapel is female—while the phallic
mushroom stands at the right, or male, side, repeating the directional juxtaposition of
eboka and mushroom at the entrance to the mythic cave of death and rebirth.
Finally, Fernandez draws attention to a certain eucharistic implication of the planting of
parts of the Pygmy who upon his death became eboka:
This makes the consumption of the roots an act of communion with the
Pygmy—originator of the cult who had been chosen by Zame and brought to
heavenly abode. Hence we have in the eating of eboka a eucharistic
experience with similarities to Christian communion. How much of this is a
syncretism with Christianity and how much is original with the Fang is difficult
to say. One can suspect more of the former. For not only do members of Bwiti
practice communion, employing eboka instead of bread, but they also boast
of the efficacy of eboka over bread in its power to give visions of the dead.
Some of the more Christian branches of Bwiti, not fully cognizant with the
origins legend, even speak of eboka as a more perfect and God-given
representation of the body of Christ! (p. 247).

41
This syncretistic view of the meaning of eboka is strikingly similar to what we find today in
Mexican mushroom rituals (see Chapter Seven) which likewise blend Christian with
traditional Indian elements and identify the mushroom with Christ. But I rather suspect that
there is more to the eucharistic implication than just Christian acculturation. In the first
place, the origin myth in which a dismembered Pygmy transforms into the sacred
hallucinogenic plant is essentially similar to the Colombian Indian tradition of the Yajé
Woman and her baby, whose dismembered body becomes Banisteriopsis caapi (see below).
This myth is certainly not influenced by Christian beliefs, any more than is the Huichol story
of peyote as the transformed flesh of the ritually slain deer deity (see Chapter Ten). Again—
the manner in which on the peyote hunt the first peyote—the flesh of the slain deer god—is
divided and distributed to his companions by the officiating shaman cannot but recall the
Eucharistic "Take, eat, this is my body." Yet there is little question that the Huichol
ceremony is pre-European and that its eucharistic element is no more "Christian" than was
the communal eating of the dismembered body of the transubstantiated "god-impersonator"
in the sacrificial rite of the Aztecs. Indeed, this act of ritual cannibalism reminded some of
the early Spaniards so uncomfortably of the rite of the Eucharist that they tried to explain it
away as vile distortion of Christian communion by the Devil himself!

Figure 1 Banisteriopsis caapi

Harmaline and Related Alkaloids

Hallucinogenic harmala alkaloids (harmine, harmaline, harmalol, and harman), which belong
to the beta-carbolines, were originally isolated from an Old World perennial Peganum
harmala, or Syrian rue. Syrian rue, the traditional source of the characteristic red dye of
Turkish carpets, is at home in the Mediterranean and central Asia, but it has several close
relatives in the southwestern United States and Mexico, of which none, so far as is known,
has ever been employed hallucinogenically. Nor do we know of any deliberate psychedelic
use of Peganum harmala, even though the plant is a very old folk remedy of whose
intoxicating potential Arab physicians and folk healers of the Orient must surely have been
aware since antiquity (Schultes, 1970:576).

42
Figure 2 Banisteriopsis rusbyana

Syrian rue is actually only one of at least eight plant families of the Old and New Worlds in
which harmala alkaloids are now known to be present. Botanically the most numerous and
culturally the most interesting of these is Banisteriopsis, a malpighiaceous tropical American
genus that comprises no less than a hundred different species, of which at least two, B.
caapi, discovered and named by Spruce in the mid-nineteenth century, and B. inebrians,
and quite possibly others, such as B. muricata, are the basis of the potent hallucinogenic
ritual beverages the Indians of Amazonia call, depending on the local language, by such
terms as caapi (more correctly, kahpi or gahpi), mihi, dapa, pinde, natema, yajé, etc. In
Quechua, the language of the Incas of pre-Hispanic Peru and of millions of Andean Indians
today, the drink is eloquently called ayahuasca, meaning "vine of the souls," a term that
has been adopted also by some non-Quechua Indians east of the Andes. Yajé (or yagé) is a
Tukanoan word widely employed in the northwest Amazon, and for the reason that by far
the best anthropological analysis ever written on the complex mythological, symbolic, and
social meanings of the Banisteriopsis drink in the aboriginal world comes from the Tukanoan
Desana of Colombia (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1971, 1972), that is what we will call it here.
According to Schultes (1972a:38), the earliest chemical studies were probably carried on B.
caapi, and it is this plant also of which Louis Lewin wrote in the 1920's, when the first
psychotherapeutic experiments with an extract of harmala alkaloids were carried out in
Germany. Originally a number of Banisteriopsis alkaloids were described under such names
as telepathine, yageine, and banisterine, but all these were eventually identified as
harmine, which is contained, along with harmaline and d-tetrahydroharmine, in the bark,
stems, and leaves of B. caapi and B. inebrians. These psychedelic alkaloids have been found
to be amazingly long-lived—much more so than those, for example, in the sacred
mushrooms of Mexico. Pieces of the stems of the type material of B. caapi which Spruce
collected in Brazil in 1851, and which were eventually deposited in England after first being
lost in the Brazilian wilderness for nearly a year under conditions that hardly favored
preservation, were recently submitted to laboratory tests at Schultes's suggestion, to see
how much, if any, of the active principles had been retained. To everyone's astonishment,
they were found to contain—after 115 years!—practically the same concentration of active
harmine as did material that had been freshly collected. Harmala alkaloids have also been
isolated from Cabi paraensis, another malpighiaceous genus that has many uses in Brazilian
folk medicine, but here again no deliberate intoxicating use is known.

43
In addition to the two principal species of Banisteriopsis from which yajé is known to be
made, there is still another that figures in this complex, B. rusbyana, whose stems and
leaves, oddly enough, do not contain the beta-carboline alkaloids characteristic of B. caapi
and B. inebrians but instead yield tryptamines, a pharmacological phenomenon to which we
will refer again when we get to the problem of hallucinogenic snuffs. For the moment let it
be said only that the way the Indians use B. rusbyana suggests that long before the advent
of modern chemistry, they discovered for themselves that the alkaloids of certain plants
require the addition of others to become psychedelically effective.

Amazonian Indians as Psychopharmacologists

No one can tell when the Indians of the upper Amazon discovered the "otherworldly" effects
of the vine of the souls. But we are probably not far wrong in suggesting that it is at least as
old as the characteristic Tropical Forest Culture, which was based on intensive root-crop
agriculture and which seems to have been well-established as early as 3000 BC or even
before (Lathrap, 1970). Tukanoan mythology places the origin of yajé at the very beginning
of the social order, when it is said to have appeared in human form soon after the male Sun
had fertilized the female Earth with its phallic ray and the first drops of semen had become
the original people. Among them appeared Yajé Woman, who bore a child that was human
in shape but also had the quality of light, for it was yajé and caused the men to have
visions. Yajé Child was dismembered, every man appropriating for himself a part of its
body. In turn, each of these became a yajé vine, which the Tukano equate with lines of
descent of their different phratries. As a result of this original act, each phratry has its own
particular kind of yajé (based not on species differentiation but on different external
appearances of the plant and the ways its effects are perceived). Descent also forms the
basis for the criteria by which different parts of the plant are chosen for the preparation of
the hallucinogenic drink (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1972).
When properly performed according to the sacred traditions, the entire yajé ritual, from the
initial cutting of the vine and the preparation of the drink to the interpretation of the
hallucinogenic effects, is highly formalized and circumscribed from beginning to end by a
series of ceremonial requirements and taboos. The pottery vessel that will hold the liquid is
a ceremonial object symbolizing the maternal womb and the creative process of gestation.
The different symbols with which it is decorated represent fertilization and fecundity,
including, on its base, a painted vagina and clitoris. Before the vessel can be used it must
be ritually purified with tobacco smoke.

44
Yajé and the Mythic Origins of Society
As described by Reichel-Dolmatoff (1972:97-102), the yajé-drinking ceremony commences
in the communal house after nightfall with ritualized dialogues that recount the Creation
Myth and the genealogies of the exogamous phratries, the origins of humanity, of yajé, and
of the social order being commemorated with song and dance to the accompaniment of
instrumental sounds: a phallic rattle staff that symbolizes the primordial fertilizing ray of the
Sun, the rhythmic pounding of wooden tubes, and the rubbing of a turtle shell with wax to
imitate the croaking of a frog. Each distribution of yajé is formally introduced by the blowing
of a decorated clay trumpet. The yajé is distributed at prescribed intervals and with ritual
gestures and speech-making by the headman, who fills the cups from the sacred maternal
yajé vessel, while the men sit or continue their dancing. As the yajé effects increase so does
the precision with which the dancers coordinate their movements, until at last they seem to
be dancing as one body. The hallucinations are called "yajé images," and the Indians say
that the order in which they appear is fixed: some are seen after the third cupful, others
after the fourth, and so on. To have bright and pleasant visions one must have abstained
from sexual intercourse and have eaten only lightly on the preceding days (exactly as in the
peyote rituals of the Huichols of Mexico). At intervals an old man or someone who lays claim
to esoteric knowledge describes his visions and interprets them publicly: "This trembling
which is felt is the winds of the Milky Way," or "That red color is the Master of the Animals."
The women meanwhile keep to themselves at one end of the house. As a rule they do not
drink but participate with shouts of encouragement or derisive laughter when someone
vomits or refuses a proffered bowl or cup.
What Reichel-Dolmatoff* writes of the subjective reasons why the Indians take yajé is of the
greatest interest, not just because of what it reveals specifically about the psychocultural
mechanisms of the social group involved, the Tukanoan Desana of the Vaupes of Colombia,
but also because of its sometimes striking similarity to other such aboriginal "psychedelic"
rituals; a comparison with the meaning of peyote among the Huichols, as described later in
these pages, will immediately demonstrate this similarity.
In the first place, the Tukano say that one who has had the yajé experience awakens as a
new person, a true Tukano, fully integrated and at one with his traditional culture, for what
he has seen and heard in his ecstatic yajé trance has confirmed and validated the ancient
truths of which the shamans and elders have told him since childhood. This is exactly what
my Huichol friends told me many times of the meaning of their initiation into the magic of
the peyote quest: "We went to find our life; we went to see what it is to be Huichol." Let me
quote some salient passages from Reichel-Dolmatoff s account:

*
For other significant recent anthropological literature on Banisteriopsis in its aboriginal context see Michael J.
Harner's The Jivaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls (1972) and Hallucinogens and Shamanism, M. J. Harner, ed.
(1973). For those who read German, Koch-Grünberg's Vom Roraima wm Orinoco (1917-1928) contains much
information on Banisteriopsis and other hallucinogenic plants in the mythology and practice of shamanism in
Venezuela, the Guianas, and Brazil, and of course R. E. Schultes's many publications are an essential source not
only of botanical and pharmacological but also ethnographic data.

45
 According to our informants of the Vaupes, the purpose of taking yajé is to
return to the uterus, to thefons et origo of all things, where the individual
"sees" the tribal divinities, the creation of the universe and humanity, the first
human couple, the creation of the animals, and the establishment of the
social order, with particular reference to the laws of exogamy. During the
ritual the individual enters through the "door" of the vagina painted on the
base of the vessel.* Once inside the receptacle he becomes one with the
mythic world of the Creation… . This return to the uterus also constitutes an
acceleration of time and corresponds to death. According to the Indians, the
individual "dies" but is later reborn in a state of wisdom, because on waking
from the yajé trance he is convinced of the truth of his religious system, since
he has seen with his own eyes the personifications of the supernaturals and
the mythic scenes… .
According to the Tukano, after a stage of undefined luminosity of moving forms and colors,
the vision begins to clear up and significant details present themselves. The Milky Way
appears and the distant fertilizing reflection of the Sun. The first woman surges forth from
the waters of the river, and the first pair of ancestors is formed. The supernatural Master of
the Animals of the jungle and waters is perceived, as are the gigantic prototypes of the
game animals, and the origins of plants—indeed, the origins of life itself. The origins of Evil
also manifest themselves, jaguars and serpents, the representatives of illness, and the
spirits of the jungle that lie in ambush for the solitary hunter. At the same time their voices
are heard, the music of the mythic epoch is perceived, and the ancestors are seen, dancing
at the dawn of Creation. The origin of the ornaments used in dances, the feather crowns,
necklaces, armlets, and musical instruments, all are seen. The division into phratries is
witnessed, and the yurupari flutes promulgate the laws of exogamy. Beyond these visions
new "doors" are opening, and through the apertures glimmer yet other dimensions, which
are even more profound… . For the Indian the hallucinatory experience is essentially a
sexual one. To make it sublime, to pass from the erotic, the sensual, to a mystical union
with the mythic era, the intra-uterine stage, is the ultimate goal, attained by a mere
handful, but coveted by all. We find the most cogent expression of this objective in the
words of an Indian educated by missionaries, who said, "To take yagé is a spiritual coitus; it
is the spiritual communion which the priests speak of."

*
Among the sacred places on the ritual itinerary of the Huichol peyote pilgrimage to Wirikuta. the divine,
paradisiacal land of the peyote and place of ultimate origins and primordial truths, there is one called "The Vagina."

46
Hallucinogens and Jaguar Transformation
Reichel-Dolmatoffs essay concerns yajé in the social setting; elsewhere he has written of
shamanism and jaguar transformation and the role of yajé and other intoxicants in this
context. It is in fact a common phenomenon of South American shamanism (reflected also
in Mesoamerica) that shamans are closely identified with the jaguar, to the point where the
jaguar is almost nowhere regarded as simply an animal, albeit an especially powerful one,
but as supernatural, frequently as the avatar of living or deceased shamans, containing
their souls and doing good or evil in accordance with the disposition of their human form
(Furst, 1968). This qualitative identity of shaman and jaguar is reflected in the fact that in a
number of Indian languages the terms for shaman and jaguar are identical or closely related
(e.g. yai or dyai = shaman, jaguar, in several Tukanoan languages). Shaman-jaguar
transformation is closely linked to the ecstatic trance, by means of tobacco or
Anadenanthera or Virola snuff among some peoples, the Banisteriopsis caapi among others,
or, as is often the case, tobacco followed by yajé. For some peoples B. caapi is the
shaman's vine par excellence, his ladder to the Upperworld, his means of achieving
transcendence. "This vine," an Indian informant told the German ethnographer Theodor
Koch-Grünberg (1923:388), who traveled widely among the Indians of the Guianas,
Venezuela, and northern Brazil in the early decades of this century, "contains the shaman,
the jaguar."
Since there are good shamans and bad—i.e. witches or sorcerers—and since both are able
to transform themselves into jaguars, it is to be expected that the great jungle cat can
appear as a malevolent and frightening demon in unpleasant yajé experiences, not
uncommonly in association with giant snakes such as the anaconda. That even a Tukano
can have an occasional "bad trip" with yajé is confirmed by Reichel-Dolmatoff (1972). There
are instances, he reports (p. 103), when he is nearly overcome by the nightmare of the
jaguar's jaws or the menace of snakes that draw near while he, paralyzed with fright, feels
their cold bodies winding themselves around his extremities.*

*
My Huichol informants explained "bad trips" as the consequence of imperfect purification prior to a peyote
pilgrimage, especially on the sexual plane. An incestuous relationship (the most serious infraction of the ethical
code) is almost certain to result in a terrifying rather than pleasant drug experience. However, such negative
experiences are not attributed to peyote; rather, say the Huichols, someone who has transgressed and not purified
himself before going out to collect peyote will be supernaturally misled into mistaking another hallucinogenic
cactus, Ariocarpus retusus, for the true peyote, Lophophora williamsii, and will suffer terrible psychic agonies
instead of seeing "what it is to be Huiehol" in vividly colored peyote dreams.

47
5. Hallucinogens And "Archetypes"
In the preceding chapter it was suggested that visions of jaguars, anaconda snakes, and the
like are expectable images in a tropical forest setting. After all, one would hardly expect
psychedelic visitations from Asian tigers or African lions among the Tukano; they would be
even less likely here than in the urban slums of Amazonian Peru, where healers called
ayahuasqueros employ the "vine of the souls" in the psychotherapeutic curing of super-
naturally caused illnesses, especially those associated with witchcraft. Such emotional or
psychosomatic maladies are a common complaint among the culturally and economically
uprooted and psychologically disoriented Indians who have left, or been displaced from,
their traditional lifeway in the forest (cf. Marlene Dobkin de Rios, The Visionary Vine:
Psychedelic Healing in the Peruvian Amazon [1972]).
There is nevertheless a distinct possibility that harmaline and other alkaloids are
biochemically involved in the formation of what Jung called archetypes, and that to this
category belong big cats of whatever species happen to be familiar to the individual. Claudio
Naranjo makes precisely that case in The Healing Journey and some of his previous
writings. As it happens, such a thesis, which has a psychological as well as biochemical
basis, is not inconsistent with what has been written by Harner, Reichel-Dolmatoff, Koch-
Grünberg, and others about the effects of harmala alkaloids on the Indians, by Harner
(1973) about his own experiences and yajé as a transcultural phenomenon, and by Naranjo
himself about non-Indian subjects in experimental settings. All this is obviously important
enough, not alone in the specific context of Banisteriopsis, to warrant some consideration
here.
Harner (1973:154-194), lists the following common themes in the yajé experiences that
have been collected over the years from Indian informants in different parts of Amazonia:
(1) The soul is felt to separate from the physical body and to make a trip,
often with the sensation of flight.
(2) Visions of jaguars and snakes, and to a much lesser extent, other
predatory animals.
(3) A sense of contact with the supernatural, whether with demons, or in the
case of missionized Indians, also with God, and Heaven and Hell.
(4) Visions of distant persons, "cities" and landscapes, typically interpreted by
the Indians as visions of distant reality, i.e. as clairvoyance.
(5) The sensation of seeing the detailed enactment of recent unsolved crimes,
particularly homicide and theft, i.e., the experience of believing one is capable
of divination.*

*
This sensation explains why one of the harmala alkaloids of Banisteriopsis caapi was originally called
"telepathine."

49
The Transcultural Phenomenon
Among the transcultural yajé experiences of South American Indians Harner lists auditory
hallucination and visions of certain geometric forms, auras, one's own death, combats with
demons and animals, bright colors, constant changing of certain shapes that seem to
dissolve into one another, and the like. However, he cautions (p. 173), it must be
remembered that all of the peoples who traditionally use Banisteriopsis occupy a similar
tropical forest environment and, however far apart, the total content of their cultures is
rather similar; these similarities could account for the striking similarity in their yajé
experiences.
What Reichel-Dolmatoff has written about the meaning of the yajé experience in relation to
certain universal or at least widespread themes and symbols in prehistoric art and in
present-day Tukanoan imagery is very much to the point here and I will return to it below.
But even more immediately pertinent to the question raised by Harner are the harmaline
experiments of Naranjo with a group of non-Indian subjects, as well as a biochemical
peculiarity of harmala alkaloids that places the whole problem in the context of the
chemistry of the brain. Harmaline is of special interest, writes Naranjo
… because of its close resemblance to substances derived from the pineal
gland of mammals. In particular, 10-methoxy-harmaline, which may be
obtained in vitro from the incubation of serotonin in pineal tissue, resembles
harmaline in its subjective effects and is of greater activity than the latter.
This suggests that harmaline (differing from 10-methoxy-harmaline only in
the position of the methoxy group) may derive its activity from the mimicry of
a metabolite normally involved in the control of states of consciousness.*
Among the typical harmaline trance symbols or experiences that many of Naranjo's subjects
reported were felines, snakes, dragons, birds, flight, sun, passage through perilous regions,
descent and ascent, death and rebirth. This experience is all very familiar from the
shamanistic world, but one particular harmaline dream among those cited by Naranjo is
especially pertinent not only because it mirrors in many of its details the characteristic
experience of initiatory ecstasy but also because it even echoes some familiar themes from
the cosmologies of ancient China and pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. The subject in this case is
a woman.

"Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright …"

Her dream begins with tiger eyes as the initiatory image, soon followed by many faces and
sleek bodies of big cats of different colors. From these images there emerges a large and
powerful Siberian tiger, an animal of grace and beauty whom she feels compelled by a great
longing to follow to the ends of the world. The tiger takes her to the edge of a high plateau,
from where she glimpses a deep abyss filled with liquid fire or molten gold in which many
people are swimming:

*
In man the pineal gland, which rises conelike from the third ventricle of the brain, is a vestigial organ,
representing more evolved forms in lower vertebrates and their long-extinct reptilian ancestors. The pineal body
has sometimes been thought to be the seat of the soul. Serotonin is a neuro-transmitter agent that occurs
naturally in the mammalian brain, including that of man, and, interestingly enough, also in the venom of toads
(Bufo spp.). The highest concentrations of serotonin have been found in the brains of schizophrenics. See also the
first footnote in Chapter Six, below.

50
 The tiger wants me to go there. I don't know how to descend. I grasp the
tiger's tail, and he jumps. Because of his musculature, the jump is graceful
and slow. The tiger swims in the liquid fire as I sit on his back… . (Naranjo,
1973:154)
They swim on together and she sees a monstrous crocodile-headed serpent-like animal
swallowing a woman. Frogs and toads suddenly appear around her as the fiery pond turns
into a stagnant, greenish swamp full of primitive life forms. But she rides her protective
tiger safely through the terrifying images to the far shore, followed by the great serpent. A
cosmic battle ensues between her protective tiger and the snake, in which she intervenes on
the tiger's side. The snake is vanquished, it disintegrates like a mechanical toy, and she and
her feline guardian travel onward together, side by side, her arm draped around the
animal's neck. They come to a high mountain and ascend it along a zigzag path that leads
upward through a forest. At the top there is a crater. Tiger and woman wait there for a
time, until there is an enormous eruption:
The tiger tells me I must throw myself into the crater. I am sad to leave my
companion, but I know that this last journey I must travel. I throw myself
into the fire that comes out of the crater. I ascend with the flames toward the
sky and fly onward. (Naranjo, 1973:155)
Experiences such as this during a single exposure to the effects of harmaline, Naranjo
writes,
… constitute a plunging of the mind into an area of myth, transpersonal
symbols, and archetypes, and thus constitute an analogue to what is the
essence of initiation in many cultures. Typically, for instance, the puberty
ordeals are occasions when the young are brought into contact (with or
without drugs) with the symbols, myths, or art works which summarize the
spiritual legacy of their culture's collective experience. The attitude toward
the world that is expressed by such symbols is regarded as important to
maturity and to the order of life in the community, and for this reason its
transmission is reverently perpetuated, made the object of initiations and of
other rituals or feasts in which the people renew their contact with, or
awareness of, this domain of existence, irrelevant to practical life but central
to the question of life's meaning. The harmala-alkaloid-containing drinks of
South American Indians are not only employed in puberty rituals but also in
the initiation of the shamans, primitive psychiatrists whose expertise in
psychological phenomena is revealed, for instance, in the fact that they are
frequently expected to understand the meaning of dreams. (1973:152-153)

Journeys into Mythic Time

All of this is very true, and obviously is of great significance not only to psychology and
psychotherapy but also to the ethnology of religion and the ecstatic experience. But it is
important to note that the phenomenon of "plunging the mind into myth" or mythic time,
that is, into a time when everything is possible, is larger than the choice of a particular
alkaloid or group of related alkaloids, because, as we know, other plants with active
principles that belong to different groups than the harmala alkaloids are also used in this
manner. And similar experiences can also be obtained without any drug. So the cultural
context has to be stressed again as being at least as important as the subjective effects of a
certain drug.

51
Transposition from the "here and now" to the "there and then" is common in the initiatory
experience, whether in the yagé ritual of the Tukano or in the peyote quest of the Huichols,
which Weston La Barre (1970b) has characterized as "probably the closest to the pre-
Columbian Mexican rite." It is especially important in shamanic curing, precisely because in
the mythic "there and then," experiences of transformation, or being and becoming, are the
normal order, and all manner of ordinarily difficult or impossible things respond with ease to
the efforts of the gods, who are themselves the original and most powerful of shamans. To
illustrate what I mean, let me digress for a moment from the contemporary yajé complex
and modern psychotherapy and return to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century central
Mexico and the world of the Nahuatl-speaking curer.
In the course of analyzing the extraordinary corpus of shamanic incantations collected in
Ruiz de Alarcon's Tratado of 1629, historian Alfredo Lopez Austin (1973) has found that the
synthesis of mythic chants and mind-manifesting drugs (e.g. picietl [Nicotiana rustica], and
also peyote, mushrooms, and ololiuhqui [morning-glory seeds]) assists the process of
curing in two ways: one, it gives the shaman or "magician" the gift of clairvoyance—the
perceptive capability of discovering the occult reality of things, the "supernatural in the
natural," in actual time and space, and of achieving contact and communication with
supernatural beings that have become visible to him. Second, myth and magic plant
… permit him to break free from the actual time and space and travel to a
world in which the action that is being attempted (the cure) is both feasible
and more effective. In short, chant and drug enable him to act in the here
and now or there and then.
For example, to set a fractured limb (which he does pragmatically by splinting) the shaman
invokes the magic powers of the drug and chants the myth of the journey of the God
Quetzalcoati to the land of the dead, Mictlan, to obtain the bones of the dead of a previous
creation and with them to recreate a new race of humanity. In the myth a quail caused
Quetzalcoati to fall and break the bones. The shaman identifies the evil spirit that has taken
possession of the fracture with this mythic quail, and he identifies himself with a divinity
that has the power of counteracting the evil and reconstituting the broken bones of the
dead. He even calls the fractured limb of his patient "bone of the world of the dead." "Aha,"
we say, "this is obviously what anthropologists call analogous magic." But that is too
simplistic, and it fails to appreciate the philosophical subtleties of the Aztec perception of
mythic times in relation to the here and now. It is not, writes Lopez Austin, that the
expulsion of the evil that has taken possession of the fracture is identified with the myth of
the taking and breaking of the bones of the dead and their re-constitution into living beings.
Rather,
the mythical element "fractured bone" is the fissure through which the
magician slips in order to avail himself of a favorable point in time. He does
not attempt to relate analogically a divine event with a result that he wishes
to obtain in the real world. It is not simply analogic magic. The magician does
not want analogies; he wants a moment of time that by virtue of being of the
Creation, and hence critical, abnormal, is also malleable, pliable, subject to
easier manipulation than any other.
None of the above invalidates Naranjo's thesis, especially with respect to archetypes; but it
does extend the mythic experience as such beyond the boundaries of a specific psychedelic.
This will be especially evident in the peyote quest (Chapters Ten and Eleven).

52
Yajé and the Origins of Art
According to Reichel-Dolmatoff (1972), the Tukano attribute everything we would call "art"
to the images that occur in the yajé dream. The striking polychrome designs that adorn the
fronts of communal houses, the abstract motifs on their pottery, bark cloths, calabashes,
and musical instruments—all these, they say, first appeared and consistently recur under
the influence of the psychedelic drink. Not only is there consensus about the forms of these
motifs, but in addition their meaning is codified, each having a fixed value as an ideographic
sign.
According to the Tukano, the geometric or nonrepresentational motifs, which are interpreted
in terms of exogamy, incest, fertility, and the like, appear with the onset of yajé
intoxication, and are followed by scenes from the mythic world, with well-defined images of
animals—especially felines and reptiles, birds and other beings, and themes whose models
are familiar from the natural and social environment of the tropical forest. It would seem,
then,
… that in a state of hallucination the individual projects his cultural memory
on the wavering screen of colors and shapes and thus "sees" certain motifs
and personages. (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1972:110)
Furthermore, there is nothing secret about the content of the dreams. The ecstatic trance
experiences are shared, and their interpretation is often done publicly by the shamans and
others respected for esoteric knowledge and wisdom. Thus a consensual fixing of images,
and their meaning, in accordance with the common cultural pattern, could easily develop
and be transmitted through time.
But that does not account completely for the striking parallels among the
nonrepresentational images described and drawn by Tukano informants. The problem
becomes even more complex,
… if we consider it from the perspective of artistic inspiration. It is amazing to
note how frequently the [geometric] design motifs … appear in the
petroglyphs and pictographs of the region and far beyond. It would not be
difficult to find parallels to these motifs in other prehistoric artifacts, such as
the decorations of ceramics or the rock carvings of ancient indigenous
cultures. It could be argued that we are dealing with such elementary motifs
that they could have evolved independently in any place and era, for they are
simply circles, diamonds, dots, and spirals, and nothing more. But are they
really that elementary? (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1972:111)
The Colombian anthropologist suggests that both the corpus of nonrepresentational images
and their ethnographic and archaeological parallels might have arisen from the organic
effects of yajé and perhaps other hallucinogens. Considering the known antiquity of the
psychedelic complex among American Indians, he writes, we might conceive of "great
cultural zones" wherein, since very ancient times, a certain hallucinogen was ritually
employed, giving rise to a body of symbols and motifs that gradually came to be culturally
fixed or institutionalized, along with their interpretations. This is all the more plausible, he
argues, in that it is typically the shamans, the bearers of the magicoreligious traditions, who
are also the artists of their societies and who are ultimately responsible for the symbolic
images that appear on the artifacts of the culture and on the living rock in their
environment.

53
That different hallucinogens tend to produce similar geometric or abstract images has been
recognized by some investigators of the psychedelic phenomenon since the 1920's. Recent
long-term experiments at the University of California at Los Angeles also indicate an organic
basis for specific sensations in fixed sequences reported by many subjects under the
influence of hallucinogenic drugs. What is new is the suggestion that the commonality of
abstract or geometric symbolic art through time and space might likewise have a
biochemical origin.
Might this be extended to include motifs we would call representational—specifically the
great cats, the snakes, and the birds that recur in so many yajé dreams? Certainly feedback
and projective mechanisms are at work here: feline, reptilian, and avian motifs predominate
in the cosmologies, the myths, and the art of prehistoric as well as contemporary Indian
societies from Mexico south. But these have to have started somewhere: might they in fact
be archetypes, embedded deeply in the unconscious since very ancient times, to be
released, perhaps, by biochemical stimuli? Are there, then, biopsychological explanations
rather than culture-historical ones for the parallels in ancient Chinese ritual art to the feline-
reptilian-avian symbol complex of the New World?* Or are both only two sides of the same
coin, interdependent rather than mutually exclusive? And how is one to understand the
similarities in the yajé experiences of Indians, anthropologists, and volunteers in psycho-
therapeutic experiments?
That something ties all these transcultural and transpersonal phenomena together seems
obvious. How much is due to the chemistry of consciousness and how much to culture,
however, remains a large unanswered question.

*
The "dragon" is the synthesis of these three cosmic elements, as is the "Feathered Serpent" of Mesoamerica.

54
6. LSD And The Sacred Morning Glories Of Indian Mexico
For Dr. Albert Hofmann of Sandoz Ltd., a well-known Swiss pharmaceutical house
headquartered in Basel, his finding in 1960 that the psychedelically effective principles of
morning-glory seeds were nothing else than lysergic acid derivatives, closely related to
synthetic LSD-25, was, as he wrote later, like "closing a magic circle" on a research series
that began more than twenty years earlier with the discovery of LSD and that finally
embraced some of the most interesting of the divine hallucinogens of Indian America.

LSD and Parkinson's Disease

In a very real sense the circle is also closing with respect to Hofmann's hope, expressed at
the time of his epoch-making discovery of LSD, that because of its ability to mimic certain
mental illnesses the drug might prove useful in their treatment. In fact, LSD has been
employed to that end over the years by some psychiatrists, often with beneficial results.
However, the potency of LSD and the severe legal limitations imposed in recent years on its
use even under controlled scientific conditions have caused psychotherapists to turn to
other chemical agents, such as those discussed in a previous chapter.
Recently, however, scientists at the School of Medicine of the University of California at Los
Angeles have made some significant discoveries about the interaction of LSD with
dopamine, one of the neurotransmitter agents in the brain, that may lead not only to a
better understanding and eventual treatment of schizophrenia, the mental disorder to which
the LSD "high" is a kind of temporary analogue, but even of such physically, rather than
mentally, crippling disorders as Parkinson's disease (UCLA Weekly, 1975:4). The
investigators, Drs. Sidney Roberts and Kern von Hungen and Diane F. Hill, determined that
adenyl cyclase, an enzyme in nervous tissue that is stimulated by naturally occurring
neurotransmitter agents, is also stimulated by the action of LSD on receptors for one of
these neurotransmitters, dopamine. In addition, LSD blocked the stimulatory actions of
dopamine and other neurotransmitters (agents that aid in conducting impulses along nerve
cells, specifically bridging the gap, or synapse, between them), such as serotonin and
norepeninephrine. These, as noted in the Introduction to this book, are themselves
structurally closely related to powerful plant growth hormones; dopamine, moreover, has
also been identified with the giant saguaro cactus (Carnegiea gigantea) of Arizona and
northern Mexico (Bruhn, 1971:323).
Schizophrenia is thought to be a disease of dopamine hyperactivity; victims of Parkinson's
disease, on the other hand, suffer from dopamine insufficiency, which is partially offset
nowadays by the administration of a new drug, L-dopa, often in combination with Tofranil or
some other amphetamine. The adenyl cyclase experiments enabled the UCLA team to show
that dopamine receptors are present in the higher regions of the brain, which are concerned
with the more complex experiences and thus are more likely to be the seat of alternate
states of consciousness, or "hallucinations." Their work, report the UCLA investigators,
makes it appear that the psychotic mimicking effects of LSD, first noted by Hofmann more
than thirty years ago, may also be related to hyperactivity of brain dopamine systems.
These insights have obvious implications for work on new drugs for schizophrenia on the
one hand and Parkinson's disease on the other; recognition of their biochemical kinship was,
of course, still far off in the distant future when Hofmann correctly predicted the ultimate
benefits of LSD for brain research. Nor did he suspect at the time that "primitive"
psychotherapy had been making effective use of a natural compound very like LSD for
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.
Lysergic acid, Hofmann (1967) has explained,

55
 … is the foundation stone of the ergot alkaloids, the active principle of the
fungus product ergot. Botanically speaking ergot is the sclerotia of the
filamentous fungus Claviceps purpurea which grows on grasses, especially
rye. The ears of rye that have been attacked by the fungus develop into long,
dark pegs to form ergot. The chemical and pharmacological investigation of
the ergot alkaloids has been a main field of research of the natural products
division of the Sandoz laboratories since the discovery of ergotamine by A.
Stoll in 1918. A variety of useful phannaceuticals have resulted from these
investigations, which have been conducted over a number of decades. They
find wide application in obstetrics, in internal medicine, in neurology and
psychiatry, (p. 349)

Historic Breakthrough: The Discovery of LSD

The significant part of our story begins in 1938, when Hofmann and an associate, Dr. W. A.
Kroll, discovered d-lysergic acid diethylamide, a derivative of ergot. Because it was the
twenty-fifth compound in the lysergic acid series to be synthesized at Sandoz, it was named
LSD-25, the designation under which it was to become famous; but at the time, since tests
on animals showed nothing of pharmaceutical interest, it was laid aside without being tested
on humans. Five years later, on April 16, 1943, in the course of working with two other
ergot derivatives, Hofmann suddenly experienced feelings of restlessness and dizziness, so
much so that he was compelled to go home. Later that afternoon, as he subsequently wrote
in his notebook, while lying down in a semiconscious and slightly delirious state he suddenly
experienced "fantastic visions of extraordinary realness, and with an intense kaleidoscopic
play of colors," a condition that endured about two hours, and in the course of which self-
perception and the sense of time itself were changed.

56
At that time LSD was not actually suspected as the cause, but as it happened, he had that
same morning recrystallized d-lysergic diethylamide tartrate while working with two other
ergot derivatives. Their effects were well known, however, and because he suspected that
he might have accidentally ingested some of the LSD compound, he decided to test the
chemical under more controlled conditions. The following week he administered to himself
what he then took to be a very small dose of one-quarter of one milligram (actually, as he
discovered and as we now know, a very substantial amount) and soon found himself in for a
six-hour-long and often highly dramatic "trip." Thus began the saga of LSD-25, the most
potent psycho-active or "psychedelic" compound known up to that time, whose discovery
ushered in a whole new era of exploration into the nature of the unconscious and the
historical role of hallucinogens in the evolution and maintenance of metaphysical and even
social systems. And inasmuch as it opened new vistas for the cross-cultural and
multidisciplinary investigation of what has been called "inner space," one cannot but agree
with psychologist Duncan B. Blewett (1969) that the discovery of LSD marked, together the
splitting of the atom and the discovery of the biochemical role of DNA, the basic genetic
material of inheritance, one of the three major scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth
century.*

Ololiuhqui, Sacred Hallucinogen of the Aztecs

Among the several sacred hallucinogens that were apparently too vital to the individual and
social equilibrium of Indian Mexico to be suppressed after the Conquest, and that took on
the trappings of Christian iconography without losing their essential pre-Christian meanings,
was ololiuhqui. Ololiuhqui (ololuc), an Aztec word meaning "round thing," contains no clue
to its botanical identity, any more than does teonanacati, food or flesh of the gods, the
name by which the Aztecs called certain hallucinogenic mushrooms. Although Ruiz de
Alarcon (1629) declined to identify the source of ololiuhqui, there should have been no
doubt from the first that the term referred to the lentil-shaped light-brown seeds of the
morning glory, for Hernandez had accurately pictured the plant in his sixteenth-century
study and Mexican botanists had long identified it as Rivea corymbosa.

*
As this book was nearing completion, the nation's newspapers were filled with disclosures of large-scale secret
experimentation with LSD by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency on many hundreds (more than
1,500 in the Army's tests alone) of human subjects, of whom at least some were not informed beforehand what
drug they were being given—a method that has been characterized as unethical by, among others, such medical
authorities as Dr. Judd Manner, President of the American Psychiatric Association. The secret tests, whose results
were not accessible to the general scientific community, continued for at least a dozen years into the late nineteen
sixties—in other words, long after LSD was made illegal, extensive campaigns were mounted on the national and
local level to convince the public of its dangers, and its unauthorized manufacture, possession, sale, use or even
free distribution made subject to lengthy prison terms. The New York Times of August 1, 1975, quoted Dr. Albert
Hofmann to the effect that he was repeatedly approached during the late nineteen-fifties by United States Army
researchers looking for a way to mass-produce large quantities of the drug; he had never been told the reason for
the Army's interest, he said, but from the extremely large quantities being discussed assumed that it was for
weapons research. Whereas a standard experimental dose was in the range of 250 to 300 micrograms, he said, the
Army was interested in finding a process that could produce "many kilos" (a microgram is one millionth of a gram,
a kilo one thousand grams). "The Army people came back many times," Dr. Hofmann told reporters, "every two
years or so, to see if any technological progress had been made," adding that the visits stopped after other
researchers succeeded in developing such a process in the early nineteen-sixties. He also said he personally did not
like what the Army was after, "because I had perfected LSD for medical use, not as a weapon. … In any case, the
research should be done by medical people and not by soldiers or intelligence agencies," especially in light of the
serious risks posed by the potent psychoehemical.
It must seem to many the height of irony and of official cynicism that even as civilian medical research with LSD
was being severely hampered by legal restrictions, and thousands of Americans, mostly young people, were being
jailed and marked for life with felony records on LSD-related charges, the drug was being covertly administered to
other thousands to see if it might prove useful for chemical warfare, while the Army was seeking ways to have it
manufactured in quantities equivalent to literally tens of millions of individual experimental doses!

57
Nevertheless, prior to 1941, when Schultes published a definitive review of the sacred
morning glories and once and for all identified ololuc or ololiuhqui as R. corymbosa, its
identity was subject to controversy, primarily because a noted American botanist, William A.
Safford, had no faith in the botanical knowledge of the Aztecs, of the early Spanish scholars,
or even of his Mexican colleagues. In 1919, Dr. Bias Pablo Reko, an Austrian-born Mexican
scholar who was later to collaborate with Schultes in Mexico, had collected ololuc seeds and
identified them as R. corymbosa. Safford (1915, 1920) confirmed the botanical
determination, but because no intoxication followed ingestion of the seeds, and because no
psychoactive alkaloids had ever been found in any Convolvulaceae, the order to which the
morning glories belong, he insisted that the real ololiuhqui had to be the seeds of Datura
inoxia (meteloides) (toloatzin), whose intoxicating effects were said to resemble those
reported for ololiuhqui (they do not, in fact). Safford was wrong, of course, as he was also
in his claim that teonanacati was not a mushroom, as reported by Sahagun and other early
chroniclers, but probably was nothing else than peyote, whose dried and shriveled "buttons"
Sahagun and other early observers, and the Aztecs themselves, had supposedly mistaken
for mushroom caps! So much for ethnocentricity in science.

Figure 3 Ololiuhqui (Rivea corymbosa). As illustrated by Francisco Hernandez in his Rerum

medicarum Novae fiispania thesaurus …, published in Rome in 1651.

58
Ololiuhqui Identified
In 1934 Reko published the first historical review of ololiuhqui use, and again identified it—
correctly—with Rivea corymbosa. Three years later, C. G. Santesson (1937) finally dispelled
the notion that the Convolvulaceae, specifically R. corymbosa, lacked hallucinogenic
principles, although the precise nature of the psychoactive alkaloids could not be
determined. Then, in 1939, Schultes and Reko, while on a field trip through Mexico, for the
first time encountered a cultivated species of R. corymbosa in the courtyard of a Zapotec
Indian curandero in Oaxaca, who was using the seeds in divinatory curing rites. Schultes
subsequently reported ololuc being used among such Oaxacan Indians as the Mazatecs,
Chinantecs, Mixtecs, and others; since then, the list has been greatly expanded, not only for
R. corymbosa but for the other major hallucinogenic morning glory, Ipomoea violacea,
whose seeds are called badoh negro in Oaxaca, and which in pre-Hispanic times was the
sacred divinatory hallucinogen tlitliltzin (Wasson, 1967a). This species is known in the
United States under such names as Heavenly Blue, Wedding Bells, Blue Stars, Summer
Skies, and others. In 1941, Schultes published his now classic monograph on R. corymbosa
and the divine hallucinogen ololiuhqui. Thus at least the botanical identification of ololiuhqui
and its mother plant, known to the Aztecs as coatl-xoxouhqui, green snake plant, was
settled, although its phytochemical determination had to wait another twenty years.

Figure 4 Rivea corymbosa

Meanwhile—in fact, just the year before Schultes and Reko collected the first unquestionably
identifiable voucher specimen of Rivea corymbosa in Oaxaca—LSD had been discovered and
synthesized in Switzerland. It was this event and subsequent research at Sandoz into
psychotomimetic alkaloids that caused the French mycologist Roger Heim to send samples
of teonanacati mushrooms to Hofmann, "on the assumption that the necessary conditions
for a successful chemical investigation would be present in the laboratory in which LSD was
discovered" (Hofmann, 1967:350). They were; Hofmann discovered psilocybine and
psilocine as the active principles of the most important hallucinogenic fungi. Close
collaboration followed with Heim and with the American ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson,
and this in turn led directly to the startling discovery of the active principles of. R.
corymbosa and /. violacea.

59
Figure 5 Rivea corymbosa. Capsules and seeds.

In the interim, there were to be two more research reports on the effects of morning-glory
seeds. Santesson had been certain that alkaloids were present but was not able to identify
them. In 1955, the Canadian psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, who had long been interested
in the use and effects of peyote, especially in the context of the Native American Church
among Canadian Indians, experimented on himself with ololiuhqui seeds. His experience did
not duplicate that reported historically from Mexico, but after taking 60 to 100 seeds he
passed into what he described as a state of listlessness, accompanied by increased visual
sensitivity and followed by a prolonged period of relaxed well-being. In 1958, V. J. Kinross-
Wright published the entirely negative results of ololiuhqui experiments with eight male
volunteers, of whom not a single one reported any effect whatever, even though individual
doses ranged up to 125 morning-glory seeds!

Figure 6 Ipomoea violacea

60
But this hardly squared with the accounts of the early chroniclers, nor with the modern
observations of Schultes and others. Quite apart from set and setting, which, as we know,
are crucial variables in the use of any hallucinogen, the problem evidently lay in the manner
of preparation of the seeds. To quote Wasson (1967 a):
In recent years a number of experimenters have taken the seeds with no
effects and this has led one of them to suggest that the reputation of
ololiuhqui is wholly due to autosuggestion. These negative results may be
explained by inadequate preparation.
The Indians grind the seed on the metate (grinding stone) until it is reduced to flour. Then
the flour is soaked in cold water, and after a short time the liquor is passed through a cloth
strainer and drunk. If taken whole, the seeds give no result, or even if they are cracked.
They must be ground to flour and then the flour is soaked briefly in water. Perhaps those
who took the seeds without results did not grind them, or did not grind them fine enough,
and did not soak the resulting flour. The chemistry of the seeds seems not to vary from
region to region, and seeds grown in the Antilles and Europe are as potent as those grown
in Oaxaca. I have taken the black seeds (Ipomoea violacea) twice in my home in New York,
and their potency is undeniable, (p. 343)
In 1959, Wasson sent Hofmann a sample of seeds in two small bottles. With it came a
letter, identifying one as having been collected in Huautia de Jimenez, the Mazatec village
that has become famous as a center of the living mushroom cult, and the other in the
Zapotec town of San Bartolo Yautepec. The first batch, wrote Wasson (quoted in Hofmann,
1967), he took to be ololiuhqui, i.e. the seeds of Rivea corymbosa. Upon botanical
investigation, this proved correct. The Zapotec seeds, which were black and angular rather
than light-brown and roundish, were identified as Ipomoea violacea, the badoh negro of
Zapotec curanderos and the tlitliltzin of the Aztecs.

LSD-like Compounds in Morning-Glory Seeds

Initial chemical-analytical studies with Wasson's small samples proved exciting enough—
they indicated the presence of indole compounds structurally related to LSD and the ergot
alkaloids. These preliminary results caused Hofmann to ask Wasson for larger quantities of
these interesting seeds. Wasson enlisted the aid of the veteran Mexican ethnologist Roberto
Weitlaner, like B. P. Reko of Austrian birth, an untiring field ethnologist even when he was
well into his seventies, and his daughter Irmgard Weitlaner Johnson, herself a noted
specialist in pre-Columbian and contemporary Indian textiles. With the assistance of the
Weitlaners, father and daughter, Wasson was able to send Hofmann 12 kilograms of Rivea
corymbosa seeds and 14 kilograms of the seeds of the blue-flowered Ipomoea violacea.
With these considerable quantities, which reached Hofmann in the early part of 1960, he
was able to isolate their main active principles and identify them as ergot alkaloids—d-
lysergic acid amide (ergine) and (d-isolysergic acid amide (isoergine). These are closely
related to d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD):
From the phytochemical point of view this finding was unexpected and of
particular interest because lysergic acid alkaloids, which had hitherto only
been found in the lower fungi of the genus Claviceps, were now for the first
time found to be present in higher plants, in the plant family Convolvulaceae.
The isolation of lysergic acid amides from ololiuhqui thus caused a research
series to close like a magical ring.

61
 It was the discovery of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) as a highly active
psychotomimetic agent, during investigations on simple acid amides, that our
research in the field of hallucinogenic compounds commenced. It was within
the framework of this activity that the Mexican magic fungi came to our
laboratories. It was during the course of these investigations that the
personal contact was made between the writer and R. G. Wasson and it was
as a result of this contact that the investigations of ololiuhqui were conducted.
In this magic drug, lysergic acid amides, which made their appearance in the
initial stages of our psychotomimetic research, were again found as active
principles. (Hofmann, 1967:351-352)
Schultes (1970) notes that the nomenclature and taxonomy of the Convolvulaceae are still
in a state of confusion. Rivea, mainly an Asiatic genus of woody vines, has five Old World
but only one New World species, R. corymbosa, which occurs, in addition to Mexico and
Central America, in the southernmost United States, parts of the Caribbean, and on the
north coast of South America. R. corymbosa is known in the literature by at least nine
synonyms, the two most common being Ipomoea sidaefolia and Turbina corymbosa.
Ipomoea, a genus of climbing herbs and shrubs, comprises at least 500 species in warm and
tropical parts of the hemisphere. /. violacea ("Heavenly Blue," etc.), is also often called/,
tricolor or/, rubro-caerulea. The psychotropic principles of R. corymbosa and /. violacea are
shared by other morning-glory species, but the degree to which any of these were or still
are used by Indians is not known. However, the fact that some are called by popular names
that allude to intoxicating properties (e.g. arbol loco, crazy tree, or borrachera,
drunkenness, a term that is also applied to Datura), suggests that these are at least known,
if not actually utilized.
Presumably to head off their popularization as an inexpensive natural psychedelic in the
United States commercial seeds of Heavenly Blue and other varieties were ordered coated
with a noxious substance. Since the artificial coating is not inheritable, nothing, of course,
would prevent hallucinogenic use of subsequent generations of seeds.
Nonetheless, for whatever reason, and despite the fact that the natural chemistry of
morning-glory seeds is far more reliable than that of synthetic hallucinogens available on
the black market, except on the West Coast* they seem not to have become integrated to
any notable extent into the drug subculture. Nor do we have any indication that morning
glories ever entered ritual contexts in the Old World or even in South America. Thus the
discovery and utilization of their psychic effects apparently belongs exclusively to the
Indians of Mexico.

Ololiuhqui in Indian Religion

According to Dr. Francisco Hernandez, that learned and observant physician to the Spanish
crown who studied the medicinal lore of Indian Mexico in the sixteenth century and whose
great work on the plants, animals, and minerals of New Spain was published in Rome in
1651,
… when the priests wanted to communicate with their gods, and to receive
messages from them, they ate this plant (ololiuhqui) to induce a delirium. A
thousand visions and satanic hallucinations appeared to them.

*
The seeds of the so-called "Hawaiian wood roses" (Argyreia spp.)—actually not roses at all but with the morning
glories members of the Convolvulaceae—achieved some popularity for easily accessible "highs," which, however,
turned out to have extremely unpleasant after-effects, such as nausea, constipation, vertigo, blurred vision, and
physical inertia (Emboden, 1972b:26). Their complex chemistry includes amides of lysergic acids.

62
Morning-Glory Seeds as Divinity
Actually, as the Spaniards quickly saw, ololiuhqui, like the mushrooms and other magical
plants, was more than just a means of communication with the supernatural. It was itself a
divinity and the object of worship, reverently preserved within the secret household shrines
of village shamans, curers, and even ordinary people in the early Colonial era. Carefully
hidden in consecrated baskets and other dedicatory receptacles, the seeds were personally
addressed with prayers, petitions, and incantations, and honored with sacrificial offerings,
incense, and flowers. Ololiuhqui was apparently considered to be male. It could even
manifest itself in human form to those that drank the sacred infusion. Accounts of the
worship of the seeds and other sacred plant hallucinogens as divinities are too specific and
they occur too often in the Colonial literature to be dismissed out of hand as mere
ethnocentric misconstructions of indigenous belief. In fact, if one looks at peyote among the
Huichols, or the mushrooms in central Mexico and Oaxaca, one finds the same sort of
identification with the divinities: peyote is the divine deer or supernatural master of the
deer species, addressed as Elder Brother and merging with some of the leading deities, and
the sacred mushrooms are personified and addressed as "ancestors," "ancient ones," "little
princes of the waters," "little saints," and the like.
As mentioned, the best early source on ololiuhqui, as on seventeenth-century indigenous
beliefs and practices in general, is Ruiz de Alarcon's Tratado on the "idolatries and
superstitions" of the Indians of Morelos and Guerrero. Several chapters of this important
work are devoted to what their author calls "the superstition of the ololiuhqui," to which, he
complains repeatedly, the Indians continued to attribute divinity in the face of the severest
denunciations and punishment. Worse, he writes, the same "superstition" threatened to
spread to the lower strata of Colonial society, for which reasons he said he felt compelled to
refrain from identifying the plant botanically, except to say that it was a vine growing
profusely along the banks of rivers and streams in his native Guerrero and neighboring
Morelos (as it still does).
The Indians had special incantations that they addressed to the divine ololiuhqui to cause
him to appear and assist in divination and the curing of illnesses:
"Come hither, cold spirit, for you must remove this heat (fever), and you
must console your servant, who will serve you perhaps one, perhaps two
days, and who will sweep clean the place where you are worshiped." This
conjuration in its entirety is so accepted by the Indians that almost all of
them hold that the ololiuhqui is a divine thing, in consequence of which … this
conjuration accounts for the custom of veneration of it by the Indians, which
is to have it on their altars and in the best containers or baskets that they
have, and there to offer it incense and bouquets of flowers, to sweep and
water the house very carefully, and for this reason the conjuration says: " …
who will sweep (for) you or serve you one or two days more." And with the
same veneration they drink the said seed, shutting themselves in those
places like one who was in the sancta sanctorum, with many other
superstitions. And the veneration with which these barbarous people revere
the seed is so excessive that part of their devotions include washing and
sweeping (even) those places where the bushes are found which produce
them, which are some heavy vines, even though they are in the wildernesses
and thickets. (Ruiz de Alarcon, 1629)

63
Thwarting the Clergy
The Indians, he complains, seemed always to find new ways to thwart even the best efforts
of the clergy, including himself as the investigating emissary of the Holy Office, hiding their
supplies of ololiuhqui in secret places, not only because they were afraid of discovery and
punishment by the Inquisition, but for fear that ololiuhqui itself might punish them for
having suffered it to be desecrated by the touch of alien hands. Always, he reports, the
Indians seemed to be more concerned with the good will of ololiuhqui than the displeasure
and penalties of the clergy. Moreover, they often pretended to cooperate in the
denunciation of "idolatry" only so as to better conceal its practice. The following story of
such a denunciation, involving a woman who had some ololiuhqui in her possession and
several of her relatives, will serve as an illustration.
It seems that the woman had been involved in a domestic quarrel and one of her male
relatives had admitted to Ruiz de Alarcon that she owned a basket filled with the sacred
seeds. Ruiz de Alarcon wanted to check the house immediately, but his informant asked if
he might be allowed to do it alone, for he knew her hiding places and would be able to
determine quickly if the ololiuhqui and all the other things he had denounced were still in
the house. Ruiz de Alarcon agreed and let the relative do the searching alone; the man soon
returned to report that the basket was nowhere to be found. Ruiz de Alarcon had the
woman and her sister placed under arrest and after questioning them "with all diligence" for
an entire day, they finally admitted that at the first sign of danger they had quickly removed
all the ololiuhqui from the oratory and divided it into many small segments, each to be
carefully secreted in a different place:
When she was asked why she had denied it so perversely she answered, as they always do,
"Oninomauhtiaya," which means, out of fear l did not dare. It is important to indicate that
this is not the same fear which they have for the ministers of justice for the punishment
they deserve, rather (it is) the fear that they have for this same ololiuhqui, or the deity they
believe resides in it, and in this respect they have their reverence so confused that it is
necessary to have the help of God to remove it; so that the fear and terror that impedes
their confession is not one which will annoy that false deity that they think they have in the
ololiuhqui, so as not to fall under his ire and indignation. And thus they say (to it),
"Aconechtlahuelis," "may I not arouse your ire or anger against me."
This particular round of investigations completed, the good friar returned to Atenango, seat
of his benefice in what is now the state of Guerrero. Here,
… knowing the blindness of these unfortunate souls, to remove from them
such a heavy burden and such a strong impediment to their salvation,
he began to preach at once against ololiuhqui, ordering the vines that grew along the river
to be cleared away, and casting quantities of the confiscated seed into the fire in the
presence of its owners. With this, he writes, "Our Lord was served." The Indians,
predictably, didn't see it that way at all, and when he soon fell seriously ill, they promptly
credited the ailment to the displeasure of ololiuhqui,
… for not having revered it, it being earlier angered by what I had done to it:
this is how blind these people are.
He recovered and to prove the Indians wrong, he chose a solemn feast day to assemble the
entire beneficio for another, more impressive burning of ololiuhqui. He ordered an enormous
bonfire built, and into it,
… with all of them watching, I had almost the totality of the said seed which I
had collected burned, and I ordered burned and cleared again the kind of
bushes where they are found.

64
Alas, the old ways persisted:
Such is the diligence of the devil that it works against us, for by his cunning
we find each day new damage in this work, and thus it is good if the ministers
of each jurisdiction are diligent in investigating, extirpating and punishing
these consequences of the old idolatry and cult of the devil…
As Wasson (1967a) notes, throughout these references of early Colonial times
… there runs a note of somber poignancy as we see two cultures in a duel to
the death—on the one hand, the fanaticism of sincere Churchmen, hotly
pursuing with the support of the harsh secular arm what they considered a
superstition and an idolatry, and, on the other, the tenacity and wiles of the
Indians defending their cherished ololiuhqui. The Indians seem to have won
out. Today in almost all the villages of Oaxaca one finds the seeds still serving
the natives as ever present help in time of trouble, (pp. 339-340)

Morning Glory and Christian Acculturation

The subtle manner in which the sacred morning-glory seeds have become interwoven with
Christian elements is evident in a step-by-step description, paraphrased by Wasson (1967a)
from an account dictated by a Zapotec Indian curandera, Paula Jimenez of San Bartolo
Yautepec:
First, a person who is to take the seeds must solemnly commit himself to take
them, and to go out and cut the branches with the seed. There must also be a
vow to the Virgen in favor of the sick person, so that the seed will take effect
with him. If there is no such vow, there will be no effect. The sick person
must seek out a child of 7 or 8 years, a little girl if the patient is a man, a
little boy if the patient is a woman. The child should be freshly bathed and in
clean clothes, all fresh and clean. The seed is then measured out, the amount
that fills the cup of the hand, or about a thimble full. The time should be
Friday, but at night, about 8 or 9 o'clock, and there must be no noise, no
noise at all. As for grinding the seed, in the beginning you say, "In the name
of God and of the Virgencita ("dear little virgin"), be gracious and grant the
remedy, and tell us, Virgencita, what is wrong with the patient. Our hopes are
in thee." To strain the ground seed, you should use a clean cloth—a new
cloth, if possible. When giving the drink to the patient, you must say three
Pater Nosters and three Ave Marias. A child must carry the bowl in his hands,
along with a censer. After having drunk the liquor, the patient lies down. The
bowl with the censer is placed underneath, at the head of the bed. The child
must remain with the other person, waiting, to take care of the patient and to
hear what he will say. If there is improvement, then the patient does not get
up; he remains in bed. If there is no improvement, the patient gets up and
lies down again in front of the altar. He stays there a while, and then rises
and goes to bed again, and he should not talk until the next day. And so
everything is revealed. You are told whether the trouble is an act of malice of
whether it is an illness, (pp. 345-346)

65
Morning Glory and Mother Goddess
In Spanish the seeds of the morning glory are commonly known as semilla de la Virgen,
seed of the Virgin. The extraordinary importance of the doncella, niha or young maiden, in
the preparation of the morning-glory infusion as well as the sacred mushrooms and other
divinatory agents has been noted by Wasson (1967a), who thought the Indians might have
seized on Christian iconography in this connection because it was already familiar to them in
their own supernatural system. I think he was quite right: these associations may well have
deep roots in the psychedelic complex of pre-Hispanic Mexico.
In 1940, long before the identification of plants in pre-Columbian art assumed its present
significance in relation to hallucinogenic research, archaeologists uncovered a complex of
mural paintings at Tepantitia, a compound of sacred buildings within the great pre-Hispanic
city of Teotihuacan, which flourished from the first to the eighth century AD north of the
present Mexico City. These paintings have been dated to the fifth or sixth century A.D.,
when Teotihuacan was not only the greatest urban center in the New World but one of the
largest cities anywhere, with perhaps as many as 100,000-200,000 inhabitants.

Figure 7 Ololiuhqui in art. Once thought to represent the male rain god Tialoc, this spectacular
mural from Teotihuacan, Mexico, dated ca. AD 500, actually depicts a great Mother Goddess and
her priestly attendants with a highly stylized and elaborated morning glory, Rivea corymbosa, the
sacred hallucinogenic ololiuhqui of the Aztecs.

The most prominent elements in the mural are a deity from which flows a stream of water
that covers the earth and feeds its vegetation, and above the central figure a great vine-like
plant with white funnel-shaped flowers at the ends of its many convoluted branches. Seeds
fall from the deity's hands and two priest-attendants flank the main figure on either side.
Below this scene are many small human figures playing, singing, dancing, and swimming in
a great lake. Because the painting appeared to conform to a well-known Aztec tradition of a
paradise ruled over by the male rain god Tialoc, and because the deity itself seemed to have
some of Tialoc's attributes, the late Mexican anthropologist Dr. Alfonso Caso identified the
mural as Tialocan, the Paradise of Tialoc.

66
That identification has recently undergone major revisions. Several specialists in the art and
iconography of ancient Mexico have come to recognize the central deity as not male but
female, which eliminates the male Tialoc of the Aztec pantheon. Instead, the deity of
Tepantitia appears now to be an All-Mother or Mother Goddess, perhaps akin to the great
Aztec fertility deity Xochiquetzal, Precious Flower, or another of her manifestations,
Chalchiutlicue. Skirt of Jade, the Mother of Terrestrial Water. With the reinterpretation of
the central deity has come a redefinition of the flowering plant that appears to tower tree-
like above her. With Schultes's assistance, the "tree" has been identified by myself as none
other than the morning glory Rivea corymbosa, clearly recognizable to the practiced eye of
the botanist, despite an overlay of mythological elements and the adaptation of natural
characteristics to the stylistic conventions of Teotihuacan (Furst, 1974a). Here then we
perceive a direct association in an ancient work of art between a Mother Goddess, water,
vegetation, and the divine morning glory, a plant that is well known to prefer the banks of
streams as its natural habitat and that is still considered to be a messenger of the rainy
season, because that is when it first begins to bloom—quite apart from its inherent magical
powers of clairvoyance and transformation.
An intricate symbolic network linking the morning glory, fecundity, and the Virgin Mary, not
only as the inheritor of the qualities of the pre-Hispanic Mother Goddess but specifically as
the divine Mother of life-giving water, was first recognized by Dr. Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran, a
well-known applied anthropologist as well as medical doctor who at this writing is
Undersecretary of Education for Cultural and Indian Affairs in the national government of
Mexico.
According to some early Colonial sources, he wrote in Medicina y Magia (1963), a significant
work dealing largely with the effects of acculturation on the religion, medicine, and magic of
pre-Hispanic Mexico, the Indians of seventeenth-century New Spain thought of the male
ololiuhqui as brother to a sacred but botanically unidentified plant called Mother of Water.
Intimately related to the male morning glory, this female plant symbolizing a water goddess
might have come to be syncretized as the result of Christian acculturation with the qualities
of the Virgin Mary, who thereby assumed a Christo-pagan identity as "Mother of Water" or
"Mistress of the Waters"—names by which she is actually still called in some villages of
central Mexico.
One cannot help wondering to what degree these post-Hispanic folk traditions might actually
reflect much older beliefs—such as those that more than a millennium earlier inspired the
unknown master of the Tepantitia murals to link the Mother Goddess of Terrestrial Water
and Fecundity with the sacred divinatory morning glory Rivea corymbosa.

67
Figure 8 Heimia salicifolia

God of Flowers and "Flowery Dream"

Recently, Wasson (1973), with the expert assistance of Schultes, has again contributed in a
major way to our understanding of central Mexican symbolism with an analysis of the floral
decorations on a famous stone sculpture of the Aztec God of Flowers, Xochipilli, in the
Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City, In addition to what he believes to be
stylized depictions of the hallucinogenic mushroom Psilocybe aztecorum, he and Schultes
identified flowers carved on the god's left leg as near-naturalistic representations of R.
corymbosa. There is no doubt in my mind that he is correct. Still other flowers depicted on
this magnificent fifteenth-century idol were recognized as those of Heimia salicifolia, the
sacred auditory hallucinogen sinucuichi of the Nahua-speaking Indians of central Mexico,
and of Nicotiana tabacum, one of the two principal sacred tobacco species (the other, as we
recall, is Nicotiana rustica, picietl).
The generic Aztec term for flower was xochitl. In Nahuati, the language of the Aztecs, writes
Wasson (1973: 324), the hallucinogenic experience was called temixoch, the "flowery
dream," and the sacred mushroom, teonanacati (tea = divine, god; ndcati = food or flesh),
was also known as xochinanacati. "Flower," then, suggests Wasson, appears to have been
used by the Aztec poets as a metaphor for the divine hallucinogens
I think Wasson is right: even now the Huichols, whose language, like Aztec, belongs to the
Nahua family, employ "flower" as poetic metaphor for their sacred peyote cactus. I also
think Wasson is correct in suggesting that Xochipilli himself was not just god of flowers,
spring, and rapture, as he is usually defined, but patron deity of sacred hallucinogenic
plants and the "flowery dream."

68
7. The Sacred Mushrooms: Rediscovery In Mexico
If true, surely one of the more significant developments in the study of the ritual use of
plant hallucinogens in Middle America is the recent spate of reports that at least some
individuals in two Maya populations in southern Mexico are employing the psychoactive
mushroom Stropharia cubensis* in the context of religious ceremony, divination, or curing.
The two groups for which this has been reported—but not as yet wholly confirmed by
scientifically trained observers—are the Chol, who live not far from the Classic Maya
ceremonial and funerary center of Palenque, Chiapas (which, like other Maya lowland sites
is thought to have been built and inhabited by Cholan-speaking Maya), and one small
population of Lacandones, of whom only a few remnant groups survive today in the general
area of the Usumacinta River near the border of Guatemala. Pending the necessary
confirmation, the several accounts that have reached anthropologists and others in the
recent past have already led to speculation that perhaps some other Maya-speaking
populations may also be found to have retained—or else re-adopted—mushroom rituals that
were long thought to have died out among them centuries ago.
Considering the stream of non-Indian mushroom "devotees" that descended on the Mazatec
Indians of Oaxaca after their mushroom rites were publicized in the 1950's and early
1960's, perhaps all that should be said for now about the Maya situation is that some
reputable scholars have become convinced over the past several years that mushrooms are
being employed ritually by at least some Chol and Lacandon Maya. It is true, however, that
colleagues who sought to confirm this on the spot were unable to do so in the brief time
available to them. At the very least, it seems, the local informants are more reticent on the
subject now than even a few years ago. Whatever the reason, the most recent efforts to
obtain first-hand information have proved unavailing. The problem is further complicated by
a peculiarity of S. cubensis: it is a dung fungus that nowadays grows typically on the dung
of cattle (as it does, for example, in the grassy meadows all around Palenque). This might
lead one to think that it could not be a native New World species but must have been
introduced together with cattle after the conquest. Against this, however, we have the fact
S. cubensis has not been reported in Spain or southern Europe, and, in any event, as we
shall see in another chapter, there is a native ruminant whose droppings are perfectly
capable of playing host to S. cubensis and that played an extraordinarily prominent role in
the cosmology of the Maya and other Indian peoples. That animal is the deer.

*
Although the species name appears to identify this psychedelic mushroom with Cuba, it should not be taken to
mean that it is, or originally was, native only to that island or Ihe Caribbean in general. Rather, it was so
designated because it was first described in 1906 by F. S. Earle after encountering it in Cuba. S. cubensis appears
to be a New World variety found mainly—but not exclusively—in Mexico and parts of Guatemala; interestingly
enough, a similar species, originally called Naematoloma caerulescens but subsequently assigned to the same
genus as S. cubensis, was identified in 1907 in what is now North Vietnam. For the most recent discussion of the
Psilocybin mushrooms, including S. cubensis, see Steven Hayden Pollock, M.D., "The Psilocybin Mushroom
Pandemic," Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 73-84 (1975).

69
The use of an hallucinogenic mushroom in Chol country was first reported by a student of M.
D. Coe at Yale University (Furst, 1972a:x); the existence of what appeared to be a well-
integrated complex of mushroom intoxication, for the purpose of conversing with the
deities, was first published by a specialist in Classic Maya art. Merle Greene Robertson
(1972), in a paper on the carved monuments of Yaxchilan, an important Maya site on the
Usumacinta River. In the course of her research, Mrs. Robertson said, she learned that
some Lacandon priests consumed the mushrooms in ritual seclusion, sometimes within the
ruins of the smaller temple or funerary structures at Yaxchilan. The mushrooms, she was
told, are prepared in specially consecrated pottery bowls that are used for no other purpose
and that differ from the so-called "god pots" with anthropomorphic decorations in which
incense is burned.
The Lacandones have been subjected to anthropological inquiry for many decades, and it
must be emphasized that although ritual intoxication is an essential aspect of their
ceremonial life, not one of these investigators witnessed, or heard of, such mushroom rites.
Nonetheless, Mrs. Robertson was told by her informants that the sacred mushrooms had
served as a medium of communication with the gods for "as long as the oldest" member of
that particular group could remember. One cannot help but feel that such information must
be taken seriously; the Indians learned long ago—with good and sufficient reason—to
conceal and disguise whatever they thought might provoke the wrath or disapproval of the
ecclesiastical authorities and other outsiders. Besides, with the exception of peyote, the
plant hallucinogens have only recently become the focus of anthropological inquiry in the
Americas and elsewhere; field workers are only just beginning to learn to ask the right
questions (or better, not to ask questions at all but wait patiently for the information to
come naturally, which may, and often does, take many weeks or months of living with the
people and convincing them that one means no harm nor desires to change their ways). So
it should perhaps not surprise us that neither A. M. Tozzer (1907), author of a classic
comparative study of the Lacandones, nor other students of Maya culture considered that
ritual intoxication—which has been well-described—might have involved more than just
alcohol.
However much it remains to be substantiated, the reported present-day existence of
mushroom use among certain Maya groups should go a long way toward settling the
question of mushroom "cults" among the ancient Maya, and the reasons for its apparent
disappearance from the one area of Middle America where the archaeological evidence for
such a cult has been most persuasive.
As Thompson (1970) noted, the Colonial sources on the Maya, which include several useful
works on herbal medicines, are silent about intoxicating mushrooms, as well as about other
botanically identified psychoactive plants (with the exception of tobacco), however much the
sacred mushrooms and plant hallucinogens in general fascinated their contemporaries
writing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century central Mexico. Yet it has long been known
that as long as 3,000 years ago at least the inhabitants of the highlands and the Pacific
slope of Guatemala, as well as some of their neighbors, held certain mushrooms to be so
sacred and powerful—perhaps even divine—that they represented them in great number in
sculptured stone. In fact, the production of mushroom images or idols of varying symbolic
complexity endured in Mesoamerica for nearly two millennia, from ca. 1000 BC to the end of
the Classic period, ca. AD 900, suggesting that a cult of sacred mushrooms not only lasted
thousands of years but was anciently more widespread than the sixteenth-century
chronicles would lead us to believe.

70
"Mushroom of the Underworld"
Actually, Thompson was only partly right when he said that the Spaniards were silent on the
matter of hallucinogens among the Maya, for several of the early dictionaries compiled by
Spanish priests in the Guatemalan highlands demonstrate considerable Indian knowledge of
the intoxicating effects of a number of mushroom species.* One of the oldest of the Colonial
word lists, the Vico dictionary, which was apparently compiled well before the 1550's,
explicitly mentions a mushroom called xibalbaj okox (xibalba = underworld, or hell, realm of
the dead; okox = mushroom), with the implication that this species is hallucinogenic. In
fact, in this context xibalbaj refers not just to the Maya underworld, with its nine lords and
nine levels, but also to having visions thereof, so that the name can be understood to mean
"mushroom which gives one visions of hell" or "of the world of the dead." The same
intoxicating mushroom is also mentioned in a later word list, Fray Tomas Coto's Vocabulario
de la lengua Cakchiquel, dated ca. 1690 (manuscript in the library of the American
Philosophical Society, Philadelphia), which pulls together much of the earlier material on
Cakchiquel-Maya. According to the Coto dictionary, xibalbaj okox, mushroom of the
underworld, was also called k'aiwiah okox, which can be translated as "mushroom that
makes one lose one's judgment."

Figure 9 Several Mushrooms

*
My colleague Robert M. Cannack, one of the most knowledgeable of scholars in the field of highland Guatemalan
ethnohistory and culture, to whom I am indebted for the mushroom references in early highland dictionaries,
recently collected mushroom lore from a Ouichean-speaking elder, confirming that some of the ancient knowledge
continues to survive.

71
The Coto dictionary also describes a mushroom called k'ekc'un, which inebriates or makes
drunk, and another, muxan okox, "mushroom that makes the eater crazy" (from mox,
meaning "mushroom" in the Mixe-Zoque languages of southern Mexico, and "crazy," or
"falling into a swoon," in Cakchiquel-Maya of the Guatemalan highlands). Lyle Campbell
(personal communication) and Terrence Kaufman, two linguists who have recently
investigated the problem of linguistic diffusion in Mesoamerica, believe muxan okox to be
one of several cases of linguistic borrowing of ritual terms from Mixe-Zoque into Maya
languages in ancient times, perhaps as early as 1000 BC, or even before. Since they also
postulate Mixe-Zoque as the language of the Olmecs—the "mother culture" of Mesoamerican
civilization—it is tempting to suggest that the Olmecs might have been instrumental in the
spread of mushroom cults throughout Mesoamerica, as they seem to have been of other
significant aspects of early Mexican civilization.

Mushroom Stones and the Cult of Sacred Mushrooms

Mention in several of the early sources on Guatemalan Maya languages of a mushroom
specifically named for the underworld—i.e. the realm of the dead—is especially interesting in
light of the discovery of a ceremonial cache of nine beautifully sculptured miniature
mushroom stones and nine miniature metates (grinding stones), dating back some 2,200
years, in a richly furnished tomb at Kaminaljuyu, a late Preclassic and Early Classic
archaeological site near Guatemala City. The coincidence of the number of mushroom effigy
sculptures interred with a Maya dignitary and the number of rulers of the traditional Maya
underworld immediately impressed archaeologist Stephan de Borhegyi (1961), who
proposed that the mushroom idols were almost certainly connected with the Nine Lords of
Xibalba, as described in the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiche-Maya.
Stone effigies of mushrooms have in fact been turning up in archaeological contexts in
Guatemala and Mexico since the nineteenth century. Borhegyi, who until his untimely
accidental death in 1969 was director of the Public Museum of Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
described, classified, and tentatively dated some 50 of these. More recently, a botanist,
Bernard Lowy (1971), augmented the list with another 50, mainly from the highlands and
Pacific slope of Guatemala. At this writing, Richard M. Rose, an anthropologist working on a
classification of all known mushroom effigies, has catalogued more than 200, many dating
to the first millennium BC The majority were found on Guatemalan soil, but others come
from as far south as El Salvador and Honduras, and as far north as Veracruz and Guerrero
in Mexico. Unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions, such as the nine miniature
sculptures from Kaminaljuyu, the majority of these interesting effigies was not recovered
under scientifically controlled conditions, so that reliable information on provenance and
context is not usually available (Richard M. Rose, personal communication).
Connection between these sculptures and the historic mushroom cults of Mesoamerica has
not always been accepted. Though many mushroom stones are quite faithful to nature, they
were, until recently, not even universally thought to represent mushrooms at all, and a few
diehards even now, in the face of all the evidence, reject this interpretation. When first
reported in the nineteenth century, the sculptures were thought to be phallic symbols only,
a theory that still crops up occasionally but that must be rejected as one-sidedly male-
centered. To have any validity at all, the phallic element would have to be seen as one half
of a male-female unity, in that the arrangement or juxtaposition of stem (male) and cap
(female) in the mushroom fits well into the traditional Mesoamerican system of
complementary opposites and the synthesis of male and female elements as the essential
precondition for fertility and fecundity. (It is this concept that is expressed so well in
Mesoamerican cosmology in the merging of a primordial male and female pair of creator
gods into a single bisexual being.)

72
It was Carl Sapper who in 1898 first identified archaeological mushroom stones from
Guatemala and El Salvador as idols of deities in the shape of mushrooms, rejecting, on
obvious morphological grounds, the notion that they had served as phallic symbols in a
fertility cult. Even now one hears it said that perhaps they were used as seats, or as
territorial markers, or even that they might have been potter's tools that served for the
making of molds for ceramic bowls. Of these, only for the marker opinion could one make
some kind of argument—but even if a mushroom idol served anciently to mark the
boundary of a community's land holdings, which in any event were considered sacred, it
could have done so as idol of a guardian deity rather than as a property marker in the
modern sense. In any case, refusal to recognize the sculptures as what they obviously are—
mushroom idols—is likely to be a function of R. G. Wasson's ingenious division of people
into those who loathe mushrooms and those who like them (or, in his terminology,
mycophobes and mycophiles), a dichotomy that he relates to the history of sacred
mushrooms in the lives of different populations since remote antiquity. Even without the
visual evidence, one would have to explain away the fact that many of these sculptures,
especially those that date between 1000 and 100 BC, not only represent a naturalistic
mushroom but also incorporate a human face or figure, or some mythic or real animal—
toads and jaguars in particular—that merge with or project from the stem. The jaguar-
mushroom association is especially interesting in light of the mention, in the Coto
dictionary, of a mushroom called "jaguar ear." One of the most intriguing of these
mushroom "idols" depicts the fungus emerging from the upturned mouth of a toad,
apparently Bufo marinus, the venomous amphibian that in much of Middle America, and
also in the South American tropics, stands for the divine earth as Mother Goddess in her
monstrous, devouring animal manifestation (e.g. Tlaltecuhtli, "Owner of the Earth," the
earth monster in Aztec cosmology, or Toad Mother Eaua Ouinahi, also meaning Owner or
Guardian of the Earth, of the Tacana Indians of Amazonian Bolivia [Furst, 1972b].) Wasson
(1967a), in his previously quoted discussion of the crucial role of the doncella, or maiden, in
the preparation of ritual hallucinogens, has drawn attention to another interesting synthesis
of naturalistic and symbolic elements in a mushroom stone in a New York collection:
The cap of the mushroom carries the grooved ring that according to Stephan
F. de Borhegyi is the hallmark of the early pre-Classic[*] period, perhaps BC
1000. The stone comes from the Highlands of Guatemala. Out of the stipe
there leans forward a strong, eager, sensitive face, bending over an inclined
plane. It was not until we had seen the doncella leaning over a metate and
grinding the sacred mushrooms in Juxtlahuaca in 1960, that the explanation
of the Namuth artifact came to us. The inclined plane in front of the leaning
human figure must be a metate. It follows that the face must be that of a
woman. Dr. Borhegyi and I went to see the artifact once more: it was a
woman! A young woman, for her breasts were only budding, a doncella. How
exciting it is to make such a discovery as this: a theme that we find in the
contemporary Mixteca, and in the Sierra Mazateca, and in the Zapotec
country, is precisely the same as we find recorded in Jacinto de la Serna and
in the records of the Santo Oficio. (p. 348)

*
According to current terminology for the cultural phases of Mesoamerican prehistory this should be called Middle
Formative. The dating is in any event only approximate.

73
Was the Fly-Agaric Sacred to the Maya?
Mushroom effigies of fired clay have also been found in Mexico, as well as South America.
Wasson himself has in his collection a fine terracotta "mushroom priestess" in the Classic
Veracruz style, probably from the middle of the first millennium A.D., and I have been able
to identify a number of ceramic mushroom depictions in the 2,000-year-old tomb art of
western Mexico (Furst, 1973, 1974c).
Before we leave the archaeological evidence from Mesoamerica, there is one intriguing point
to be made about the probable taxonomy of the various mushroom representations. The
morphology of the west Mexican ones leaves little doubt that a species of Psilocybe is
meant. Some of the clay effigies even emphasize the characteristic knob or bump in the
center of the cap. Oddly enough, however—considering that there is no evidence that the
genus Amanita was ever employed hallucinogenically in Mesoamerica—some Guatemalan
mushroom stones seem less to resemble Psilocybe than Amanita muscaria, the fly-agaric of
Siberian shamanism, which also grows in highland Guatemala and elsewhere in North
America. On the other hand, the fact that the stem or stipe of the mushroom stones is
usually thick like that of A. muscaria, and not spindly like that of Psilocybe, might be a
function only of the sculptor's material, especially where the stipe is combined with a human
or animal effigy. Perhaps there were formerly also wooden mushroom idols that more
closely approximated the characteristics of Stropharia or Psilocybe mushrooms. In any
event, the Quiche-Maya of the Guatemalan highlands are evidently well aware that A.
muscaria is no ordinary mushroom but relates to the supernatural, what with the fact that
they have named it cakuljd ikox (cakuljd = lightning, ikox = mushroom) (Lowy, 1974, 188-
191). A. muscaria is thus related to the Quiche-Maya Lord of Lightning, Rajaw Cakuljd, who
also directs the dwarflike rain bringers, called chacs in former times but now generally
Christianized (in name, not function) as angelitos, little angels.
The ceramic art of the Moche civilization of Peru (ca. 400 BC-AD 500) also includes a
number of anthropomorphic mushroom effigies, as well as personages with mushroom
headdresses, dating to the first centuries AD Even more interesting is a certain class of
spectacular pendants of cast gold from northern Colombia and Panama, apparently
representing a deity. Most are highly stylized, but they share one feature—a pair of
hemispheric headdress ornaments that look vaguely like bells on an old-fashioned
telephone. These had long mystified specialists in the prehistoric art of the region until
Andre Emmerich (1965) published a convincing argument that they were pairs of
mushrooms that had undergone a stylistic evolution from near-naturalism in earlier pieces
to greater stylization, including loss of the stem, in the later ones. Paired mushroomlike
head ornaments in fact also occur to the north, on archaeological figurines found in Jalisco,
western Mexico. Little is known of pre-Hispanic mushroom use in South America, with the
single exception of an early Jesuit report from Peru that the Yurimagua Indians, who have
since become extinct, intoxicated themselves with a mushroom that was vaguely described
as a "tree fungus."

74
It is fitting, in the developing story of the Mexican mushrooms, that recognition be given
especially to the contribution of that scholarly amateur (in the original complimentary
meaning of the word), R. Gordon Wasson. It was he and his late wife, Valentina P. Wasson,
who in the mid-1950's rediscovered the living mushroom cult of Oaxacan Indians and
brought it to the attention of the world, not only in the pages of Life and in scientific
journals but in a remarkable book. Mushrooms, Russia and History (1957). In its pages
Borhegyi and Wasson suggested a connection between the sacred mushrooms of Mexico
and the prehistoric stone mushrooms of Guatemala—the first time that such a possibility
had been considered in print. But this takes us slightly ahead of our story, which should
properly begin in the sixteenth century when Sahagun first described slender-stemmed
hallucinogenic mushrooms with small round heads that the Aztecs called teonandcati, flesh
or food of the gods, which he said were usually taken with honey (as the Lacandon are also
said to take them), and which could have either pleasant or frightening effects. Francisco
Hernandez (1651) was more specific; he mentioned three different kinds of intoxicating
mushrooms that were revered by the people of central Mexico at the time of the Conquest.
In the seventeenth century Jacinto de la Sema and Ruiz de Alarcon were still perturbed by
the continued survival of such mushrooms in indigenous ritual, but thereafter they pass out
of the literature, without a single one having been identified botanically—so much ignored
that the economic botanist Safford (1915) decided they had never existed at all and that
teonandcati must have been peyote!
Safford's ethnocentric verdict came to be widely accepted although it flew in the face of
some very specific historic references (e.g. Sahagun: "It grows on the plains, in the grass.
The head is small and round, the stem long and slender"—a description that hardly fits the
peyote cactus, which occurs only in the semi-arid northern high desert. One who disagreed
was the aforementioned Dr. Reko, who insisted that the old sources were accurate and that
the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms had in fact survived in remote mountain villages of
Oaxaca.

Found at Last: A Living Mushroom Cult in Mexico

He was to be proved right in the late 1930's. In 1936 "Papa" Weitlaner encountered magic
mushrooms for the first time in the country of the Mazatecs in Oaxaca. He sent a specimen
to Reko, who forwarded it to the Harvard Botanical Museum, where unfortunately it arrived
too badly deteriorated to be identified. In 1938, Weitlaner, his daughter Irmgard, and her
future husband Jean Basset Johnson, on a field trip to Huautia de Jimenez became the first
outsiders permitted to attend—though not participate in—an all-night curing ritual in which
mushrooms were eaten. Johnson, who lost his life in North Africa in 1944, described the
experience at a meeting of the Sociedad Mexicana de Antropologia in August 1938 and in a
more extensive paper published by the Gothenburg Ethnographic al Museum (1939).
Mushroom use, he wrote, appeared to be widespread in Mazatec country; shamans, or
curers, used them primarily for the purpose of divining the cause of an illness, and during
the session it was the mushrooms, which were held in great reverence, that were believed
to speak, not the curer. Johnson also confirmed that not just one but several kinds of
intoxicating mushrooms were known to the Indians.

75
In August 1938, a month after the Weitlaner-Johnson experience at Huautia de Jimenez,
Schultes and Reko received from Indian informants in the same village specimens of three
different species they were told were revered by the people for their visionary properties.
Schultes took careful notes of their morphology and in 1939 published the first scientific
description. In 1956, the distinguished French mycologist Roger Heim, director of the
Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, identified one as Psilocybe caerulescens, another was
defined by the Harvard mycologist Dr. David Under as Panaeolus campanulatus,
subsequently redefined as P. sphinctrinus; and the third by Dr. Rolf Singer as Stropharia
cubensis.
Schultes and Reko on their field trip in 1938 had also been able to extend the area of sacred
mushroom use beyond the frontiers of Mazatec country to other Indian groups of
southeastern Mexico. In the years since, more mushroom-using populations have been
added to the list, including, as recently as 1970-1971, the Matlatzinca of San Francisco
Oxtotilpan, a small town located about 25 miles southeast of Toluca in the state of Mexico,
and possibly also the Chol and Lacandon in the Maya lowlands. The Matlatzinca, who belong
to one of the oldest language families of Mexico, the Otomian, are the first inhabitants of
central Mexico to have been identified with mushroom use since the sixteenth and
seventeenth century, and the Chol and Lacandon are, as already noted, the very first Maya
populations for whom sacred mushrooms have been reported in historic times. Altogether
we now know of about fifteen different Indian groups, each with its own language, whose
curers employ hallucinogenic mushrooms. There are likely to be still others, including
lowland and perhaps even highland Maya-speakers, among whom the ancient practice will
eventually be found to have survived.

"Mycophiles" and "Mycophobes"

In the meantime Mexican mushroom research had entered an entirely new and more public
phase with the entry of the Wassons into the picture. Wasson was a banker, a vice
president of J. P. Morgan & Co. in New York; his wife, Valentina Pavlovna (who died in
1958), was a Russian-born pediatrician. Wasson has often told the story of their deep
personal stake in mushroom research, which received its initial impetus with his discovery,
on their honeymoon, that he and she had assimilated from their different parental cultures
very different—indeed, diametrically opposed—points of view toward mushrooms in general,
and wild ones in particular:
A little thing, some will say, this difference in emotional attitude toward wild
mushrooms. Yet my wife and I did not think so, and we devoted a part of our
leisure hours for more than thirty years to dissecting it, defining it, and
tracing it to its origin. Such discoveries as we have made, including the
rediscovery of the religious role of the hallucinogenic mushrooms of Mexico,
can be laid to our preoccupation with that cultural rift between my wife and
me, between our respective peoples, between mycophilia and mycophobia
(words we devised for the two attitudes), that divide the Indo-European
peoples into two camps. (1972a:186)

76
In 1952, the Wassons first learned of the early Colonial descriptions of mushroom rites and
their confirmation by Schultes and others in the late 1930's, and, simultaneously, of the
remarkable archaeological artifacts called mushroom stones. In 1953 they plunged seriously
into the problem, spurred on by a lengthy description of Mazatec mushroom practices they
received from Miss Eunice Pike, a missionary linguist with the Wycliffe Bible Translators,
who had spent several years among the Indians of Oaxaca. (See Pike and Cowan, 1939.)
Belief in the sacred mushrooms was indeed widespread, she confirmed, but the Indians
guarded their secrets well against strangers. As Johnson had reported in 1939, she wrote
that pre-Christian and Christian religious concepts and terminologies were inextricably
intermingled in the Oaxacan mushroom rites (as, indeed, they are everywhere else, with the
exception of the Lacandon; Huichol peyote ritual is likewise essentially non-Christian in
meaning and terminology). For example, the Mazatecs spoke of the mushrooms as the
blood of Christ, because they were believed to grow only where a drop of Christ's blood had
touched the earth; according to another tradition, the sacred mushrooms sprouted where a
drop of Christ's spittle had moistened the earth and because of this it was Jesucristo himself
that spoke and acted through the mushrooms. (Hofmann, 1964)*

"A Soul-Shattering Happening"

In 1953 the Wassons went to Oaxaca for the first time, but another two years passed before
they were able to develop a sufficiently warm bond of trust with their Indian hosts to be
permitted to partake of the sacred mushrooms. So, in 1955, Wasson and a companion, Alan
Richardson, became the first outsiders to actually participate in a mushroom curing
ceremony—an unforgettable experience, Wasson later reported, that was to profoundly
affect him, who by his cultural inheritance had once utterly "rejected those repugnant fungal
growths, manifestations of parasitism and decay" (1972a: 185).
In his enthusiasm for the extraordinary psychic effects of the mushrooms and other sacred
hallucinogens, Wasson would not be misunderstood as suggesting that these are, or were,
the only means of attaining the ecstatic state. Clearly, poets, prophets, mystics, and
ascetics
… seem to have enjoyed ecstatic visions that answer the requirements of the
ancient Mysteries and that duplicate the mushroom agape of Mexico. I do not
suggest that St. John of Patmos ate mushrooms in order to write the Book of
the Revelation. Yet the succession of images in his vision, so clearly seen and
yet such a phantasmagoria, means for me that he was in the same state as
one bemushroomed. (1972a:196)
Nor would he suggest that Blake had to have taken mushrooms or some other natural
hallucinogen in order to write that "he who does not imagine in stronger and better
lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing eye can see, does not
imagine at all." Nevertheless,

*
This belief seems to have its origin in indigenous shamanism. In Mexico, as everywhere else in shamanistic
religion, supernatural and therapeutic power are attributed to the shaman's spittle, which is sometimes identified
(as among the Papago of Arizona) as rock crystals in liquid form, rock crystals being near-universally regarded as
crystallized spirits, usually of deceased shamans. Divine spittle is also related to the origin of the sacred mushroom
in Siberia (see Chapter Eight).

77
 … the advantage of the mushroom is that it puts many (if not all) within reach
of this state without having to suffer the mortifications of Blake and St. John.
It permits you to see, more clearly than our perishing mortal eye can see,
vistas beyond the horizons of this life, to travel backward and forward in time,
to enter other planes of existence, even (as the Indians say) to know God. …
All that you see during this night has a pristine quality: the landscape, the
edifices, the carvings, the animals—they look as though they had come
straight from the Maker's workshop. (1972a:197-198)*
Wasson came away from what he later characterized as a profoundly soul-shattering
happening, convinced that the magical powers the Indians had ascribed since ancient times
to their revered mushrooms were very real indeed, and that chemistry alone could never
fully account for the experience of an ineffable mystery, akin to those of the ancient Greeks,
with the simultaneous participation of all the senses:
… the bemushroomed person is poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible,
incorporeal, seeing but not seen. In truth, he is the five senses disembodied,
all of them keyed to the height of sensitivity and awareness, all of them
blending into one another most strangely, until, utterly passive, he becomes a
pure receptor, infinitely delicate, of sensations. (p. 198)

The Mosaic Completed

Nevertheless, Wasson was sufficiently a child of the scientific age not to leave it at that (he
is, in fact, a meticulous and critical scholar and tireless researcher, as demonstrated by his
extraordinary book on the identity of Soma [1968] and his latest work, the first definitive
monograph on an Oaxacan mushroom rite [1974]). Even before his Mazatec mushroom
experience he was in close contact with Roger Heim as one of the leading mycologists in the
western world, and Heim now accompanied him on further expeditions into the mountains
of Oaxaca, in consequence of which a dozen or so different mushrooms of the family
Strophariaceae, mostly of the genus Psilocybe, but also of Conocybe and Stropharia, were
identified. With the additional field work of Singer (1958) and the Mexican botanist Gaston
Guzman-Huerta (1959a, b), by the end of the 1950's the mosaic of the sacred mushrooms
of Mexico, completely unknown only twenty years earlier, was reasonably complete.

*
It is typical of the syncretistic nature of the present-day mushroom cult that some Oaxacan Indians say God gave
them the sacred mushrooms because they could not read and it was necessary for him to speak to them directly
through the mushrooms. Eunice Pike and her fellow missionary Florence Cowan (Pike and Cowan, 1959) have
related how difficult it is to explain the Christian message to people who are convinced they already possess the
means—the sacred mushrooms—to receive the word of God in immediate and vivid form, to visit heaven for
themselves, and to establish direct contact with God. Readers interested in other sensitive accounts of the
mushroom experience might consult, apart from Wasson's most recent work (1974), Henry Munn's essay in Harner
(1973).

78
According to Schultes's summary of 1972, and his and Hofmann's collaborative monograph
on the plant hallucinogens (1973), species of Psilocybe and Stropharia are the most
important, the most significant being apparently Psilocybe mexicana, P. caerulescens var.
mawtecorum, P. caerulescens var. nigripes, P. yungensis,* P. mixaeensis, P. hoogshagenii,
P. aztecorum, P. muliercula, and Stropharia cubensis. Singer (1958) reported that his own
work in Oaxaca failed to find Panaeolus sphinctrinus—one of the three hallucinogenic
species the Indians gave Schultes and Reko in 1938—in the Mazatec inventory of sacred
mushrooms. But as Schultes (1972a) points out, different shamans have their own favorite
species and also tend to vary these according to seasonal availability and the precise
purpose for which the mushroom is intended. Psilocybe mexicana, a small, tawny inhabitant
of wet pasture lands, he writes, is probably the most important species utilized
hallucinogenically in Mexico, but the strongest psychedelic effects seem to belong to
Stropharia cubensis.
Heim was able to propagate a laboratory culture of the sacred mushrooms in Paris, but
when attempts to isolate the active principles of Psilocybe mexicana proved unsuccessful,
he submitted several specimens, as well as other species, to Hofmann for analysis at
Sandoz. Hofmann was almost immediately successful in discovering the agents responsible
for the extraordinary psychic effects of the mushrooms, and, shortly afterwards, in
reproducing the chemicals synthetically without the aid of the plants themselves. The
principal active agent was identified to be an acidic phosphoric acid ester of 4-
hydroxydimethyltryptamine, allied to other naturally occurring organic compounds such as
bufotenine and serotonin, and probably derived biogenetically from tryptophane. This he
named psilocybine. Also present as an unstable derivative was a compound he called
psilocine. The same constituents have been isolated from several North American and
European mushroom species that are not used as hallucinogens and for which we have no
indication that they were ever so employed (Schultes, 1972a: 10).
The active agents of the sacred mushrooms, Hofmann reported, amount to about 0.03% of
the total weight of the plants; to achieve the effect of as many as 30 mushrooms (only a
few are actually used at a time in the rite) would require only 0.01 gram of the crystallized
powder dissolved in water.
Hofmann (1964) has summarized the most important results of the phyto-chemical
investigation of the sacred mushrooms as follows: Psilocybine and psilocine are chemically-
structurally related to serotonin, a substance that occurs in the mammalian brain and that
plays a role in the chemistry of brain function. The structural relationship of the active
principles of the mushrooms with serotonin provides an explanation for their psychic effects,
and offers insights into the biochemistry of the brain itself. The pharmacological phenomena
are explainable in terms of central excitation of the sympathetic nervous system. In human
subjects, doses of 6 to 20 milligrams bring about, without any physical symptoms worth
mentioning, fundamental changes or transformations of consciousness, with wholly different
perceptions of space, time, and one's psychic and bodily self. The sense of sight and also
that of hearing are greatly heightened, to the point of visions and hallucinations. Not
uncommonly, long-forgotten events, often those that belong to the realm of earliest
childhood, manifest themselves with extraordinary clarity.

*
Schultes suggests that this might have been the species employed by the Yurimagua Indians of Peru.

79
Although he was by no means finished with the phytochemistry of the mushrooms (for
example, he himself, in the company of Wasson, was still to experience their wondrous
mystical effects in a mushroom rite conducted by the famous Mazatec curing priestess Maria
Sabina [Wasson et al., 1974]), for Hofmann the stage was now set for his discovery in the
divine morning glories of lysergic acid derivatives closely related to LSD—just as the
synthethis of LSD in 1943 had led to the isolation of psilocybine and psilocine in the sacred
mushrooms.

80
8. The Fly-Agaric: "Mushroom Of Immortality"
The Koryaks of Siberia have a marvelous tale in which the culture hero Big Raven has
caught a whale but discovers that he cannot return him to his proper home in the sea
because he is not strong enough to lift the grass bag with the provisions the whale requires
to sustain himself on the long voyage. Big Raven appeals to the great deity Vahiyinin, which
means Existence, and Vahiyinin tells him to go to a certain place where he will find spirit
beings called wapaq. If he eats some of these wapaq spirits they will give him the strength
he needs to gather the bag and assist the whale.
Vahiyinin spat upon the earth and where his spittle fell there appeared little white plants
with red hats on which the god's saliva transformed into white flecks. It was these
miraculous plants that were the wapaq. Big Raven ate some, as he had been told, and soon
felt so powerful and exhilarated that he was easily able to lift the heavy grass bag, enabling
the whale to return to his home. Wapaq showed Big Raven the path the whale was taking
out to sea and the manner in which he would return to his comrades. When Big Raven saw
all this he told the wapaq, "O wapaq, grow forever on this earth," and to his children, the
people, he said that they should learn whatever wapaq had to teach them.
According to Waldemar (Vladimir) Jochelson (1905/1908), a Russian ethnologist who with
his colleague Vladimir Bogoras contributed considerable data on the native peoples of
Siberia to the American Museum of Natural History's Jesup North Pacific Expedition around
the turn of the century, the Koryak believe that the wapaq would tell any man who ate
them, even if he were not a shaman, "what ailed him when he was sick, or explain a dream
to him, or show him the upper world, or the underground world, or foretell what would
happen to him."
As the reader will undoubtedly have guessed, the wapaq of Koryak mythology is none other
than the familiar fly-agaric (Amanita muscaria)—the spectacular red-capped and white-
flecked "toadstool" whose renown among Europeans has for so many centuries floated
uncertainly between the realm of magic and transformation, on the one hand, and death
from its allegedly fatal poison on the other. In reality, the fly-agaric is hallucinogenic rather
than deadly, having served for thousands of years as the sacred inebriant of the
shamanistic religions of the northern Eurasiatic forest belt, especially those of Siberian
hunters and reindeer herders. This enormous region, from the Baltic Sea to Kamchatka, is
the only area in the world outside Middle America where mushrooms are known to have
been employed extensively as sacred vehicles of ecstatic intoxication in recent times (on a
minor, and strictly localized scale, hallucinogenic fungi have also been used in New Guinea
and Africa). Long ago, however, as Wasson has shown, the religious use of the fly-agaric
was far more widespread in the Old World; it was in fact this remarkable "mushroom of
immortality" that was the mysterious divine inebriating plant deity called Soma in the
worship of the Indo-European peoples who invaded India from the northwest ca. 1500 BC
Of this identification more later.
As early as the mid-1600's and with greater frequency and more detail from the eighteenth
century on, a variety of foreign travelers with unequal gifts of observation and objectivity
commented on fly-agaric as a ritual inebriant among the tribesmen of Siberia. Depending on
local custom and tradition, the mushrooms might be eaten raw or cooked, fresh or dried, or
in liquid form either as an infusion or as a decoction of the juices of the mushroom mixed
with berries. Commonly the mushroom seems to have been allowed to dry to some degree
before it was consumed—a significant observation in relation to the psychoactivity of
Amanita muscaria (p. 93, following).

81
With the advent of anthropology in the nineteenth century, at least some of the descriptions
of mushroom intoxication and their ritual and mythological contexts take on a less
ethnocentric flavor, but there are also older accounts that seem remarkably modern in their
approach to what must have seemed to the average European very strange customs indeed.
Outstanding in this respect, as we shall see, was the German naturalist Georg Heinrich von
Langsdorf.

The Fly-Agaric and the Intoxicating Urine

There was one aspect of Siberian mushroom intoxication, reported even in the earliest
sources, that must have seemed singularly shocking to one who encountered it for the first
time—the drinking of the urine of a bemushroomed person, and also the urine of reindeer
that had browsed—as reindeer apparently like to do—on the fly-agaric.
By no means all the tribes that used Amanita muscaria also drank fly-agaric urine, but the
custom was sufficiently well-developed and widespread to have drawn the attention of
almost every observer—from Count Filip Johann von Strahlenberg, a Swedish colonel who
spent a dozen years in Siberia as a prisoner of war and reported on his observations in the
early eighteenth century, to the trained ethnographers of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, when the Europeanization of Siberia, which had begun in the
seventeenth century, was well underway, but before traditional tribal life began to be
radically transformed even in the remoter hinterlands in the aftermath of the Russian
Revolution.
As one might expect, not all the Europeans who saw the urine-drinking rite were able to
report on it with detachment; and there are amusing instances in which the writer tries hard
to hint at what he saw, or heard described, without being too specific, lest he offend the
delicate sensibilities of his Victorian readers. As mentioned, a notably early exception was
Langsdorf, who in 1809 published an extensive description of the fly-agaric among the
Koryak, including the urine-drinking rite and at least its pharmacological, if not its
ideological, foundation. He was also the only one of the early observers to inquire into the
specific nature of the hallucinogenic drug contained in the mushroom—a question that was
not to be definitively settled until the late 1960's, a full century after an alkaloid called
muscarine, long credited as the main hallucinogenic agent in fly-agaric intoxication but now
known to play only a minor role, was first isolated from Amanita muscaria.
After describing the psychic effects of the mushroom, which the Koryak took mainly in dried
form or soaked in berry juices, Langsdorf turned to the phenomenon of urine-drinking:
The strangest and most remarkable feature of the fly-agaric is its effect on
the urine. The Koryaks have known since time immemorial that the urine of a
person who has consumed fly-agaric has a stronger narcotic and intoxicating
power than the fly-agaric itself and that this effect persists for a long time
after consumption. For example, a man may become moderately drunk on
fly-agarics today and by tomorrow may have completely slept off this
moderate intoxication and be completely sober; but if he now drinks a cup of
his own urine, he will become far more intoxicated than he was from the
mushrooms the day before… . (Langsdorf, quoted in Wasson, 1968:249).
The intoxicating effect on the urine, he continues, is found not only in those who actually
eat the mushroom but in anyone who drinks the urine. Because of this peculiar effect the
Koryaks could prolong their ecstasy for several days with a relatively small number of fly-
agarics:

82
 Suppose, for example, that two mushrooms were needed on the first day for
an ordinary intoxication; then the urine alone is enough to maintain the
intoxication on the following day. On the third day the urine still has narcotic
properties, and therefore one drinks some of this and at the same time
swallows some fly-agaric, even if only half a mushroom; this enables him not
only to maintain his intoxication but also to tap off a strong liquor on the
fourth day. By continuing this method it is possible, as can easily be seen, to
maintain the intoxication for a week or longer with five or six fly-agarics.
Equally remarkable and strange is the extremely subtle and elusive narcotic
substance in the fly-agarics, which retains its effectiveness permanently and
can be transmitted to other persons: the effect of the urine from the eating of
one and the same mushroom can be transmitted to a second person, the
urine of this second person affects a third, and similarly, unchanged by the
organs of this animal secretion, the effect appears in a fourth and fifth
person. (Langsdorf, quoted in Wasson, 1968:249-250)
Langsdorf, who seems to have been the only one of his time to whom such advanced
questions occurred, wondered not only about the psychopharmacology of the fly-agaric
drug, but also whether there was something about the mushroom that might impart a
special, "possibly quite pleasant," smell and taste to urine, qualities that were known to
adhere, for example, to asparagus and turpentine. By analogy, he writes—again
considerably ahead of his time—it might be worth investigating whether other psychoactive
substances, such as opium, digitalis, cantharides, and the like might also retain their
properties in urine. In any event, he concludes, the nature of the fly-agaric
… offers the scientist, physician, and naturalist a great deal of food for
thought: our materia medica might perhaps be enriched with one of the most
efficacious remedies.
Not, one would assume, in combination with urine, the very idea of which would have
horrified the Europeans—as, indeed, it would shock many of us today. We have to
remember, however, that (as Wasson, for whom the urine-drinking aspect of the Siberian
fly-agaric rite was to prove of great significance to his identification of Soma, has pointed
out) in the non-Occidentalized East the attitude toward urine was very different from that
prevailing in the West. In Asia, for example, urine was widely employed as a medicine and a
sterile disinfectant and in certain areas served also in religious devotions. Likewise in Aztec
Mexico—I have found several references to the therapeutic use of urine in Sahagun's
Florentine Codex. Not only did Aztec physicians use urine externally to cleanse infections,
but it was administered internally as a medicinal drink, particularly for disorders of the
stomach and intestines. I hasten to add, however, that there is no hint that urine ever
figured in ritual intoxication.

Chemistry and Effects

Wasson (1967b), who has tried the fly-agaric on himself, has summarized what limited
knowledge can be gathered from the literature on the subjective effects of the mushroom:

83
 a. It begins to act in fifteen or twenty minutes and the effects last for hours.
b. First it is soporific. One goes to sleep for about two hours, and the sleep is
not normal. One cannot be roused from it, but is sometimes aware of the
sounds round about. In this half-sleep sometimes one has colored visions that
respond, at least to some extent, to one's desires.
c. Some subjects enjoy a feeling of elation that lasts for three or four hours
after waking from the sleep. In this stage it is interesting to note that the
superiority of this drug over alcohol is particularly emphasized: the fly-agaric
is not merely better, it belongs to a different and superior order of inebriant,
according to those who have enjoyed the experience.* During this state the
subject is often capable of extraordinary feats of physical effort, and enjoys
performing them.
d. A peculiar feature of the fly agaric is that its hallucinogenic properties pass
into the urine, and another may drink this urine to enjoy the same effect… .
This surprising trait of fly-agaric inebriation is unique in the hallucinogenic
world, so far as our present knowledge goes.
Now, if it is not muscarine, which was isolated from Amanita muscaria in 1869, that was
responsible for these effects, nor bufotenine, which has recently but mistakenly been
reported to be an active constituent of fly-agaric, what is responsible?
Recent studies by Professors Conrad H. Eugster (1967) and Peter G. Waser (1967, 1971) of
the University of Zurich, a chemist and a pharmacologist respectively, have demonstrated
what it is. For while muscarine is present in A. muscaria as a minor constituent, not it but
rather two isoxazoles, ibotenic acid and muscimole, constitute the principal psychoactive
constituents, with others remaining to be studied (Schultes, 1970). It is muscimole that
holds the pharmacological key to the urine-drinking custom. Muscimole, they discovered, is
an unsaturated cyclic hydroxamic acid that secretes through the kidneys in basically
unaltered form. It was this about which Langsdorf speculated as long ago as 1809. But
there is more yet, for the investigators discovered that there is a natural conversion of
ibotenic acid to the more stable muscimole. And this in turn relates directly to the preferred
manner in which the mushroom was consumed. To quote Wasson (1972c: 12):
Ibotenic acid is present in the fresh fly-agaric in widely varying amounts,
ranging from 0.03% to 0.1%. When the fly-agaric dries, the ibotenic acid
steadily disintegrates and disappears. Thus we have the unique situation
where a psychotomimetic agent converts itself through simple drying into
another active agent that is more potent and far more stable. In [the book]
Soma I give in extenso (and in summary on pp. 153 ff.) the almost
unanimous testimony, extending over two centuries and throughout almost
the whole of the northern tier of tribes from the valley of the Ob to the
Chukotka, that the fly-agaric must not be eaten fresh: it should be dried,
preferably sun-dried. The empirical knowledge of the Siberian natives is now
confirmed by Eugster.
Before turning to Wasson and Soma, let us look once more at the urine-drinking rite in
Siberia. According to Strahlenberg (1736):

*
Langsdorf reported that the Koryaks greatly preferred fly-agaric to the vodka of the Russians, because mushroom
intoxication was not followed by headache and other unpleasant symptoms.

84
 The Russians who trade with them [Koryak], carry thither a kind of
Mushrooms, called, in the Russian Tongue, Muchumor, which they exchange
for Squirrels, Fox, Hermin, Sable, and other Furs: Those who are rich among
them, lay up large Provisions of these Mushrooms, for the Winter. When they
make a Feast, they pour Water upon some of these Mushrooms, and boil
them. They then drink the Liquor, which intoxicates them; The poorer Sort,
who cannot afford to lay in a Store of these Mushrooms, post themselves, on
these Occasions, round the Huts of the Rich, and watch the Opportunity of the
Guests coming down to make Water; And then hold a Wooden Bowl to receive
the Urine, which they drink off greedily, as having still some virtue of the
Mushroom in it, and by this Way they also get Drunk. (Quoted in Wasson,
1968:234-235.)
Langsdorf, we recall, reported in 1809 that for inebriation the Koryak much preferred the
fly-agaric to vodka. This would suggest that as early as the eighteenth century, and
certainly by the nineteenth, what had formerly been purely religious-shamanistic mushroom
intoxication was to some degree breaking down under the impact of the fur trade and the
Europeanization of Siberia—akin to what happened in North America with the introduction of
whiskey to Indians who had previously been accustomed to ecstatic or dream states as
profound religious experiences. On the other hand, we cannot assume that the Europeans
were really equipped to understand what they saw or heard. There are accounts from the
nineteenth and twentieth century that leave no doubt that the mushrooms were widely
regarded as sacred and that their primary purpose was magicoreligious, enabling shamans
to communicate with the spirit world (e.g. Jochelson: "Many shamans previous to their
séances eat fly-agaric in order to get into ecstatic states" [1908:583]). Jochelson also
makes it clear that the eating of sacred mushrooms was not restricted to the rich or even to
shamans, and that in any event the crimson Amanita muscaria was plentiful in Koryak
territory, which contradicts Strahlenberg's claim that the poor had to rely on the fly-agaric
urine of the rich in order to get intoxicated, even in the winter when the mushroom is not in
season.
As a matter of fact, the way Langsdorf describes the urine-drinking rite suggests that his
functional or economic interpretation, while certainly correct, tells only half the story. It
seems to me that the sharing of the shaman's own intoxicating body fluid with his fellows,
and theirs among themselves, beyond economizing on the supply of fly-agaric could have
served to symbolize the total unification of the celebrants with one another and with the
personified spirit power of the mushroom. If so, the real meaning of this curious rite is
fundamentally the same as the ritual passing of peyote from one to the other on the Huichol
peyote pilgrimage, when after the harvest of the sacred cactus, personified as Elder
Brother, each pilgrim gives some of his or her peyote to each of the companions,
customarily by placing a piece directly into the other's mouth. This giving is repeated
several times in a counterclockwise circuit. "One gives and one receives of the flesh of Elder
Brother," intones the officiating shaman, "so that all are of one heart, so that all is unity."
Finally, it should be noted that muscarine, said to induce profuse sweating and twitching in
some who take the mushroom directly, seems to be lacking in fly-agaric urine, so that those
who drank their own or another's were spared these unpleasant side-effects of mushroom
inebriation. One would assume that this too would have contributed far more to the
popularity of the practice than economic considerations, aside from whatever symbolic
meanings adhered to it.

85
9. R. Gordon Wasson And The Identification Of The Divine
Soma
In the second millennium before our Christian era, a people who called themselves "Aryans"
swept down from the Northwest into what is now Afghanistan and the Valley of the Indus.
They were a warrior people, fighting with horse-drawn chariots; a grain-growing people; a
people for whom animal breeding, especially cattle, was of primary importance; finally, a
people whose language was Indo-European, the Vedic tongue, the parent of classical
Sanskrit, a collateral ancestor of our European languages. They were also heirs to a tribal
religion, with an hereditary priesthood, elaborate and sometimes bizarre rituals and
sacrifices, a pantheon with a full complement of gods and other supernatural spirits, and a
mythology rich with the doings of these deities. Indra, mighty with his thunderbolt, was
their chief god, and Agni, the god of fire, also evoked conspicuous homage. There were
other gods too numerous to mention here. Unique among these other gods was Soma.
Soma was at the same time a god, a plant, and the juice of that plant.
So Wasson begins his remarkable work, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, first
published in 1968 and republished in 1971 in a popular edition. The Soma sacrifice, in the
words of the Vedic scholar Dr. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty in her review of the post-Vedic
history,
… was the focal point of Vedic religion. Indeed, if one accepts the point of
view that the whole of Indie mystic practice from the Upanisads through the
more mechanical methods of yoga is merely an attempt to replace the vision
granted by the Soma plant, then the nature of that vision—and of that plant—
underlies the whole of Indian religion, and everything of a mystical nature
within that religion is pertinent to the identity of the plant, (quoted in
Wasson, 1968:95)

The Elusive Soma Deity

But that was just the problem—however many species different Vedic scholars have
identified with Soma in the nearly two centuries since Sanskrit was first translated into
European languages, its true identity proved elusive. Soma and its sacrifice are celebrated
in many hymns, but the Rig Veda was sung by the ancient poet-priests for their
contemporaries, who did not need to be told what Soma was precisely, and they obscured
the mysterious plant god's natural morphology with all sorts of poetic imagery and inspired
metaphors that hardly qualify, nor were intended, as botanical descriptions (e.g. "mainstay
of the sky," with his foot at the earth's navel and his crown in the heavens; "divine udder,"
"he has clothed himself with the fire-bursts in the Sun," and the like).

87
Among the plants which Vedic scholars have put forward as Soma have been Sarcostemma
brevistigma and related species; Ephedra vulgaris, Ipomoea muricata; different species of
Euphorbia; Tinospora cordifolia (a climbing shrub an extract of which is used as an
aphrodisiac and a cure for gonorrhea in Indian folk medicine); Peganum harmala, Cannabis
indica (in the form of bhang), and even rhubarb. Others have suggested that Soma. might
have been a fermented drink or a distilled liquor. But there is nothing in the Rig Veda to
suggest a process of fermentation, and distilled alcohol was as unknown in ancient India as
it was in the New World before the coming of the Spaniards, not to mention that liquor
would have been anathema to the devout Hindu. As a matter of fact, the Rig Veda informs
us exactly how the marvelous drink was prepared: the dried Soma plants were moistened
with water to make them swell up again and pounded with pestles. After being filtered
through a fine woolen cloth, the tawny yellow inebriating juice was imbibed by the Vedic
priests in their sacrificial rites. The effects, as these emerge from the poetic imagery of the
hymns, were clearly what we would now call hallucinogenic or psychedelic.
Of the numerous species that have been proposed over the years the most persistent had
been the aforementioned Sarcostemma, a leafless sprawling herb with a milky juice that is
employed as an emetic in Indian folk medicine. It is true that the Rig Veda describes Soma
as having no leaves, but unlike the red-flowered Sarcostemma, the mysterious Soma plant
also lacked roots and blossoms. Nor is there evidence that Sarcostemma has psychoactive
properties, particularly of the kind implied in such Vedic hymns as one that speaks of the
priestly imbiber of the divine Soma having the power of flight beyond the limits of heaven
and earth and feeling strong enough to pick up the earth itself and move it about wherever
he desired.
Indeed, not one of the plants identified with Soma before Wasson's fly-agaric theory burst
upon the scene of Vedic scholarship
… has carried any conviction, and all are implausible philologically,
botanically, and pharmacodynamically. It is no wonder that most ranking
twentieth-century scholars have come to regard the problem of soma as
insoluble. (La Barre, 1970c:370)

Multidisciplinary Quest
Wasson initiated his quest for Soma in 1963, and he did so from entirely different points of
view than had the Vedists. Above all, he recognized his own limitations and drew on a wide
variety of disciplines and international experts in their respective fields to assist him.
Basically his problem was this: Soma was clearly a hallucinogenic plant with certain well-
defined subjective effects but lacking a botanical identity. As early as the first
millennium BC the real Soma plant disappeared from Vedic ritual and the name came to be
applied to various substitutes, of which none had the same psychic effects as the original
Soma and all of which were known at least to the priestly caste to be substitutes. This
assumption cannot be proven, admits Wasson, but must have been a fact from the very
beginning:
The contrast between the ecstasy of Soma inebriation as sung in the hymns
and the effects, often vile, of any of the many substitutes was always too
glaring to be ignored. (1968:7)
But it is the substitutes with which the commentaries on the Vedas, the Brahmanas, written
after 800 BC, concern themselves, and it is they, not the original Vedas, that form the basis
for all the plants that have been identified with Soma by western as well as Indian scholars.
Wasson's methodological astuteness, writes La Barre (1970c),

88
 has been to use the Rig Veda evidence alone, eschewing the tempting but
wholly irrelevant prolixity of the Brahmanas. When taken all together and
respected literally for what they say, the Vedic apostrophes to Soma turn out
to be quite exact and mutually consistent botanical descriptions of the
mushroom A manita muscaria… the fly agaric, (p. 370)
Wasson proposed that the "Aryans" arrived in the Indus Valley from their homeland to the
northwest with a well-integrated ancestral cult of the sacred fly-agaric, and that what
remained of archaic Siberian mushroom ritual in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
actually represents a kind of fossil of the ancient ecstatic-shamanistic stratum in which the
Vedic rites of the early second millennium BC had their ultimate roots. If so, then the Vedic
priests would from the start have had to wrestle with the problem of substitutes for the
divine plant, for the fly-agaric is not always and everywhere available and like most
mushroom species cannot be cultivated. It can, of course, be dried and preserved. And here
the Rig Veda's description of Soma's preparation—a dried, leafless, rootless, blossomless
plant to which water was added to make it swell up again—certainly suggests dried
mushrooms. Similarly, the effects of the divine inebriant—including sensations of enormous
strength, already mentioned in the Koryak myth, and of flight to the ends of the universe—
fit precisely those of Amanita muscaria. Likewise, once one accepts the idea that Soma was
the fly-agaric, many previously obscure Vedic passages that allude with poetic metaphors to
Soma's appearance fit remarkably well those of the fly-agaric in its different stages.

Photo 1 Amanita muscaria. The divine Soma of the ancient Indo Europeans and magic
hallucinogenic mushroom of Siberian shamanism. Courtesy R. Gordon Wasson.

But why would the priests have abandoned so miraculous and divine a plant in favor of
substitutes that lacked the marvelous properties of the original Soma? Even this falls into
place as a function of environmental adaptation once one accepts Wasson's thesis. The fly-
agaric, as he points out, is a mycorrhizal mushroom which in Eurasia, including the ancient
homeland of the Indo-European Vedic-speakers, grows only in an underground relationship
with the pines, the firs, and above all, the birches. Where there are no such trees there is
no fly-agaric. Stands of conifers were not inaccessible to the northern settlers of India but
they were distant; the mushrooms could be dried and transported but the long distances
and other factors, such as unpredictable seasonal availability, would have made substitution
necessary and acceptable—certainly preferable to total abandonment of the traditional
rituals themselves. Eventually, and perhaps even deliberately, the real Soma would have
come to be forsaken altogether and its identity, though not its sacred meaning and its
psychic effects, forgotten by all but the innermost privileged circle of priests.

89
I might add here that Wasson's thesis can be supported with an analogy from contemporary
Mexico. At least two Indian populations that traditionally relied on peyote for their curing
rites—the Tepehuanos of western Mexico and the (unrelated) Tepecanos of Veracruz—are
known to have recently adopted a post-Hispanic import, a species of Cannabis (marihuana),
as a substitute, because peyote has become too difficult and costly to obtain from its
natural habitat in the north-central Mexican desert, several hundred miles distant from both
these indigenous populations.

Fly-Agaric Urine and the Identity of Soma

With this we come to a crucial point in the development of the argument for Amanita
muscaria, one that has predictably caused no end of debate among scholars. The
psychoactive properties of the fly-agaric, we recall, are unique among the psychedelics in
that they pass unaltered through the kidneys, which explains why in Siberia it was
customarily taken in two forms:
First Form: Taken directly, and by "directly" I mean by eating the raw
mushroom, or by drinking its juice squeezed out and taken neat, or mixed
with water, or with water and milk or curds, and perhaps barley in some
form, and honey; also mixed with herbs such as Epilobium spp.
Second Form: Taken in the urine of the person who has ingested the fly-
agaric in the First Form. (Wasson, 1968:25)
Now, Wasson points out, the Rig Veda refers unmistakably to two forms of Soma. This in
itself is not a new discovery, but as he notes, the interpreters of the sacred hymns, knowing
nothing of the ethnobotany and chemistry of Amanita muscaria, always assumed that the
first form was Soma juice alone and the second Soma mixed with curds or milk. Wasson
demonstrates that the two forms parallel rather precisely the two forms of the fly-agaric in
Siberian shamanism. For the god Indra and the priests are actually spoken of by the poets
as drinking Soma and pissing it. One famous verse, cited by the noted Sanskrit scholar
Daniel H. H. Ingalls (1971) of Harvard in a review of Wasson's Soma, addresses the god
Indra thusly:
Like a thirsty stag, come here to drink.
Drink Soma, as much as you want.
Pissing it out day by day, O generous one,
You have assumed your most mighty force.
This cannot but remind us of the close association between fly-agaric and reindeer in
Siberia. The same can also be said of passages that refer to the Rudras, zoomorphic storm
deities that protected cattle, drinking and pissing Soma in the form of brilliantly shining and
colored horses.
Wasson does not assert that the Vedic priests actually drank Soma-urine, but he cites
passages from early sacred texts as well as later ones that at least allude to such a
Siberian-like practice—e.g. Zarathustra's excoriation in the Gatha of the Avesta, Yasna
48.10: "When will you (O Mazdah) do away with the urine of this drunkenness with which
the priests evilly delude the people?"

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The Controversy Lives On
As might be expected, the identification of Soma as a mushroom was not greeted with equal
enthusiasm among all Vedic scholars, nor has everyone who accepts his basic thrust—that
Soma was the fly-agaric—agreed with each and every one of his interpretations of the
ancient texts. Professor Ingalls, for example, fully agrees with the fly-agaric identification
but not with his theory of urinated Soma. The most vehement criticism came from an
eminent British scholar, John Brough, Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Cambridge
(1971), who insisted that Soma cannot and must not be identified on any but internal
evidence from the Rig Veda itself—a task that has proved insoluble to Vedic scholars—and
that any parallel data from outside the Indo-Iranian sphere, such as those from Siberia, are
extraneous and irrelevant. Wasson's detailed rejoinder (1972c) published in November by
Harvard's Botanical Museum, makes a point that is as applicable to all the sciences—hard,
social, natural, or humane—as it is to the discipline to which it is specifically addressed:
Let the Vedists leave off feeding exclusively on the Rig Veda and each other.
Let them be on easy terms with the outside world, with botanists, chemists,
pharmacologists, physiologists: with anthropologists, prehistorians, and
students of religion among early cultures, living and moribund and dead.
Brough's paper on every page shouts his need (unfelt by him) for those
interdisciplinary contacts to which on principle he closes his eyes and ears. If
the older generation of Vedists includes many for whom this expanded
opportunity is disturbing, younger scholars will certainly seize on it with
enthusiasm, (p. 41)
And not just younger scholars either. The greatness of a discovery, writes Professor Ingalls
in the aforementioned comment on Wasson's book,
… lies in the further discoveries that it may render possible. To my mind the
identification of the Soma with an hallucinogenic mushroom is more than a
solution of an ancient puzzle. I can imagine numerous roads of inquiry on
which, with this new knowledge in hand, one may set out. In a few
paragraphs I shall indicate only one such road, a road on which I have
traveled a short distance. (1971:190)
Reading Wasson, he writes, inspired him to study Rig Veda Book 9, which deals primarily
with Soma. As a result he began to perceive a qualitative difference between the Soma
hymns and certain other hymns of the Rig Veda:
The two poles seem to me to be the Soma hymns and the Agni hymns. The
two gods represent the two great roads between this world and the other
world… . They run straight through; they are the great channels of
communication between the human and the divine: the sacred fire and the
sacred drink.* Greatly to simplify matters, I would put the difference between
the Agni hymns and the Soma hymns this way. The typical Agni hymn
juxtaposes a given ritual with a mythical prototype, with the "prathamani
dharmani." The ritual is intended to reactivate the prototype and to give to
the participants the strength of their semi-divine ancestors. The Soma hymns,
on the other hand, employ their imagery quite differently. The ascent of Soma
to the river of heaven is not an act in the mythical past. It is happening right
now, as the Soma juice cascades through the trough, (p. 191)

*
As the threefold fire god—earthly fire, lightning, and solar fire—Agni is second only to Indra in ancient Vedic and
Hindu worship. He is the offspring of the vertical and horizontal sticks of the fire drill, sometimes called Agni's "two
mothers." The Vedic word Agni is cognate to the Latin ignis = fire, and of course also to the English ignite.

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The Agni hymns are reflective, mythological, seeking for harmony between this world and
the sacred but always aware of the distinction, while the Soma hymns concentrate on the
immediate experience:
I am speaking of two sorts of religious expression and religious feeling, one
built about the hearth fire, with a daily ritual: calm, reflective, almost
rational; the other built around the Soma experience which was never
regularized into the calendar, which was always an extraordinary event,
exciting, immediate, transcending the logic of space and time. (p. 191)
Much of this parallels in the most exciting and specific way the peyote ceremony of the
Huichols of Mexico. For there again we find the same juxtaposition: on the one hand, the
fire god, at once sacred hearth and mediator between the everyday world and the world
beyond, the great fire shaman who leads the peyoteros into the mythic past, and on the
other the divine hallucinogen, Deer-Peyote, and the immediate, ecstatic experience that
transcends the boundaries between the here and now and the there and then. But this takes
us a bit ahead of ourselves (see Chapters Ten and Eleven).

A New Road of Inquiry

Wasson (1972b) himself also embarked on a "new road of inquiry" that led him to make the
intriguing suggestion that the very concept of the Tree of Life and the Marvelous Herb that
grows at its base in the folklore of many peoples might have had its genesis in the
mycorrhizal relationship between the fly-agaric and certain trees, above all the birch and
the pine. Throughout Siberia, he points out, the birch is revered as the shaman's sacred
tree, which he ascends in his trance to reach the Upperworld:
Uno Holmberg, in the Mythology of all Races, has summarized for us the folk
beliefs that surround the birch. The spirit of the birch is a middle-aged woman
who sometimes appears from the roots or trunk of the tree in response to the
prayer of her devotee. She emerges to the waist, eyes grave, locks flowing,
bosom bare, breasts swelling. She offers milk to the suppliant. He drinks, and
his strength forthwith grows a hundredfold. … In another version the tree
yields "heavenly yellow liquor." What is this but the "tawny yellow pavamana"
of the Rig-Veda? Repeatedly we hear of the Food of Life, the Water of Life,
the Lake of Milk that is hidden, ready to be tapped near the roots of the Tree
of Life. There where the Tree grows near the Navel of the Earth, the Axis
Mundi, the Cosmic Tree, the Pillar of the World. What is this but the Mainstay-
of-the-Sky that we find in the Rig-Veda? The imagery is rich in synonyms and
doublets. The Pool of "heavenly liquor" is often guarded by the chthonic spirit,
a Serpent, and surmounting the tree we hear of a spectacular bird, capable of
soaring to the heights, where the gods meet in conclave, (pp. 211-213)
Wasson proposes that this well-known theme had its origin in the Eurasiatic forest belt and
not, as has sometimes been suggested, in Mesopotamia and the ancient Near East, where it
is found in the Sumerian Gilgamesh epic and, in somewhat different but obviously related
form, the Book of Genesis. If his reconstruction holds good, Wasson concludes,
… the Soma of the Rig-Veda becomes incorporated into the religious history
and prehistory of Eurasia, its parentage well established, its siblings
numerous. Its role in human culture may go back far, to the time when our
ancestors first lived with the birch and the fly-agaric, back perhaps through
the Mesolithic and into the Paleolithic. (p. 213)

92
If it is indeed that ancient, it would also help explain why the same motif is found in
strikingly similar form in Maya art as well as in shamanic tradition and ritual of other
indigenous peoples of the New World.

Antiquity and Origins of the Mushroom Cult

It can of course be argued that the two great mushroom traditions, that of New World
Indians and that of the peoples of Eurasia, are historically unconnected and autonomous,
having arisen spontaneously in the two regions from similar requirements of the human
psyche and similar environmental opportunities. But are they really unrelated?
A good though controversial case has been made by some prehistorians for sporadic early
contacts across the Pacific between the budding civilizations of the New World and their
contemporaries in eastern and southern Asia, perhaps as early as the second millennium BC
The West, until very recently, consistently underrated the maritime capabilities of the early
Chinese, whose ships more than 2,000 years ago were not only already considerably larger
and more seaworthy than those of medieval Europe but were equipped with an effective
rudder of a type adopted by the Europeans only shortly before Columbus embarked on his
first voyage of discovery. Moreover, it was the Chinese who invented the compass. So we
must at least grant them the potential of having crossed the Pacific, whether they ever did
so or not. Now if as seems likely, the Chinese once worshiped an hallucinogenic mushroom
and employed it in religious ritual and medicine,* and if some of their sages reached the
New World, by accident or design, they could of course have introduced some of their own
advanced pharmacological knowledge, or at least the idea of sacred mushrooms, to the
ancient Mexicans. The same would apply to early India, whose calendrical system, like that
of China, bears a perplexing resemblance to its pre-Hispanic Mexican counterpart. But these
are very big ifs indeed.
Considering the proven antiquity of hallucinogens in the New World, it seems more
reasonable to refer back to La Barre's argument and consider the problem in the context of
the ecstatic-shamanistic phenomenon as a whole. The roots of the New World mushroom
complex, as of the other ritual hallucinogens, would then have to be sought in a common
pan-Eurasiatic-American Paleo-Mesolithic substratum, predating not just the evolution of
advanced transoceanic sailing capabilities in ancient China or southern Asia, but even the
first peopling of the New World. In that case, we could see the sacred mushroom of Paleo-
Siberian tribes as prototype for all the ritual hallucinogens that proliferated so spectacularly
among New World Indians, and the sacred mushrooms of Middle America as linear
descendants of the fly-agaric.
This approach is the more plausible in that Wasson himself has traced some of the common
names for the fly-agaric in Indo-European languages to Proto-Uralic, which ceased to be
spoken around 6000 BC (the Proto-Uralic term was *panx, ancestral to the Ob-Vgricpango,
the Gilyakpangkh, as well as OUT fungus or punk). The seventh millennium BC is obviously
substantially later than the major movements of the proto-American hunters who carried
their north Asian intellectual and material heritage from Siberia to Alaska across the Bering
land connection, the thousand-mile-wide corridor of low-lying tundra that was submerged
when the sea level rose by 200-300 feet with the melting of the Pleistocene glaciers about
12,000 years ago.

*
Wasson (1968:80-92) makes a persuasive case that the celebrated Ling Chih, the supernatural fungus of
immortality and spiritual potency, endlessly represented in Chinese art from early times, had its genesis in the
Eurasiatic cult of the divine hallucinogenic mushroom—i.e. Soma = Amanita muscaria—even through its abundant
artistic forms came to be based on Ganoderma lucidum, an inedible species of woody fungus.

93
But old though it is, we might imagine that Proto-Uralic was probably still a language of the
distant future when the psychodynamic properties of the fly-agaric were first discovered by
some venturesome shaman of an unknown Paleo-Eurasiatic hunting people exploring his
environment not only for medicinal species but also for plants capable of transporting him to
different, non-ordinary, planes of existence.

Discovery of Hallucinogens: Deliberate or Accidental?

Which brings up a point that was raised in the Introduction in relation to the plant
hallucinogens in general: it is almost impossible to conceive that the discovery of the
transformational qualities of certain acrid mushrooms that were clearly unsuitable as
ordinary food could have been anything but the result of conscious search for
psychodynamic agents and even deliberate experimentation for different ways to activate or
heighten their effects. As we saw, this requirement applies especially to the fly-agaric, since
it was dried, preferably in the sun, to have the desired effect.
That the Mexican mushrooms, on the other hand, can be eaten fresh* could, I suppose,
mean that their magical properties were accidentally discovered when people already
accustomed to wild mushrooms in their diet tried them as food. Perhaps so. Certainly it
could have been the case in some very remote, primordial time. But to suppose this of the
ancestors of the Indians of Oaxaca, one would have to conjure up a vision of the most
primitive kinds of humans scavenging almost indiscriminately for anything that appeared
edible—a picture that squares with absolutely nothing we know of the food-gathering
behavior of the most technologically primitive hunters still left on earth and even less of
incipient cultivators. Moreover, an environment in which mushrooms grow is not likely to
have been deficient in all kinds of edible resources with far greater food value than the
characteristically small and fragile sacred fungi.
What we must also remember is that traditional or pre-industrial people who live in
harmony with their environment are the inheritors of a far more sophisticated level of
knowledge than ours of the natural world on which their lives depend, and that they
discriminate much more decisively and often more accurately than do we between its
different phenomena. In the present case this reminder implies that ordinary and magic
mushrooms should not even belong to the same category. And that is precisely the situation
as we find it among present-day Indians.
As mentioned earlier, the Matlatzincas, who live about a hundred miles southwest of Mexico
City, in a valley surrounded by pine forests and towered over by the majestic 15,000-foot-
high Toluca volcano, have recently been added to the growing list of sacred-mushroom-
using populations. Ordinary wild species also figure importantly in their diet, so that they
would certainly fall into Wasson's category of "mycophiles." However, the sacred fungi and
ordinary kinds are not simply lumped together under an all-embracing category of
"mushroom." Rather, the hallucinogenic species is considered entirely separately, being
grouped with such supernatural phenomena as God, the Virgin Mary, saints, ancestors,
mountain spirits, and the like.
The Matlatzincas' highly complex mushroom taxonomy has been studied in detail by the
Mexican linguist Roberto Escalante, and I am indebted to him for the data that follow. (Also
see Escalante, 1973; Escalante and Lopez, 1971.)

*
As was pointed out to me by Wasson, anciently a common method of consuming the sacred mushrooms was to
press them out and drink their juice—i.e., the same way Soma was taken in Asia. However, they could also be
eaten raw, often with honey, as indeed they often are today by Mexican Indians.

94
To the Matlatzincas, as to other Indians of Mesoamerica, edible mushrooms are of great
dietary importance because they sprout during periods of scarcity, when the maize is
growing in the fields but when it is still too early for the harvest. During the rainy season,
when little work is required in the fields, mushroom gathering involves the entire family,
regardless of sex or age, so that it is essential that the criteria of identification be
thoroughly familiar to everyone.

A Mexican Indian Mushroom Taxonomy

No less than 57 different species or varieties are distinguished, named, and classified down
to the last detail, including external characteristics and extending even to specific use or
uselessness of each variety. Two principal nonhallucinogenic groups are recognized, one
identified by the generic prefix xi (the smuts), the other by chho, followed by more specific
phrases or terms that identify the species respectively by habitat, color, form, texture,
similarity to other objects, and the like—for example, Green Mushroom of Maize, Mushroom
(like) Gourd, Mushroom of the Birch. The Matlatzincas also know exactly which species are
"companions"—i.e. sprout at the same time—which can contribute to identification where an
edible species closely resembles a poisonous one. Overall, mushrooms are considered to be
formed of three parts—the cap, called "its little face," the stem or stalk, "its little foot," and
the gills, "its inside," although some species utilized by the Matlatzinca may, like the
puffballs, be recognized as consisting only of the "little face." In any event, in order to
identify the mushrooms the Indians first observe the whole, then the "little face," then "the
little foot," and finally the interior. Needless to say, such careful observation is especially
important where an edible species is closely related and similar to a dangerously toxic one,
as in the case of the edible Amanita species.
Now, in contrast to the edible species identified by the generic prefixes xi or chho, meaning
mushroom, the sacred hallucinogenic species, Psilocybe muliercula—which are gathered
near the river bank and which must always be replaced by an offering of wild flowers—are
not called "mushroom" at all but are identified as divine personages: ne-to-chu-tdta =
(dear) little sacred lords, or, in Spanish, santitos, literally saints but also signifying
ancestors, divine ancient ones, and the like.*
Matlatzinca mushroom taxonomy, which places edible mushrooms in one category and the
hallucinogenic kind into a wholly different metaphysical one, alongside deities and spirits,
illustrates not only how thorough must be knowledge of the plant world when survival itself
depends on it, but also that we must not assume a functional relationship between
mushrooms in the daily diet and mushrooms as divine beings or mediators between man
and the supernatural. To most of us, all mushrooms, sacred or culinary, may look more or
less alike, but to the Indians they are wholly different experiential phenomena.

*
Ne-to-chu-tdta, it is said, will diagnose the cause of the illness and prescribe the medicine, and even give a
massage to the afflicted organ. Beautiful visions are also reported, including flowers, stars, and gardens, as well as
terrible ones, such as blood oozing from cornstalks, serpents, skeletons, and dismembered bodies. The last is
especially significant in that visions of dismemberment -and skeletonization are related by the Matlatzincas—as by
other traditional peoples—to shamanic initiation.

95
Hallucinogenic Mushrooms North of Mexico
As a matter of fact, the ethnographic and ethnobotanical situation in North America proves
just that. While we have as yet no conclusive evidence that any kind of psychoactive
mushroom was employed by Native Americans north of Mexico, however important edible
mushrooms might have been to their diet, it is a fact that, as was noted in a previous
chapter, a number of varieties containing psilocybine and other hallucinogenic compounds
occur in North America, including species of Psilocybe. Moreover, as La Barre (1970c) has
pointed out, the flaming-red variety of Amanita muscaria—the sacred species of the
northern Eurasians—is native not only to Asia and Europe but to British Columbia,
Washington, Oregon, and Colorado, as well as the Sierra Madre of Mexico. The yellow
variety occurs elsewhere in North America, including the northeast, especially in coniferous
and birch forests—precisely the favorite habitat of Amanita muscaria also in the Old World.
We shall never know whether any memory of its wondrous properties remained with the
first Americans to encounter the fly-agaric in their new northern environment, or indeed if
any of their descendants ever tried it. There is no direct mention of fly-agaric use in any of
the oral traditions of which we have records. Yet in historic times the urine of shamans was
considered to possess great magical and therapeutic powers by some of the Northwest
Coast tribes; shamans preserved their urine carefully in containers reserved for that
purpose and employed it to guard themselves and others against malevolent beings, by
such techniques as blowing it through tubes in the direction of supernatural danger. Alaskan
Eskimos, whose culture originated in Siberia some 13,000 years ago, likewise respect urine
for its magical properties, and hold the bladder in high regard as the seat of special powers.
Could such beliefs be survivals of a more ancient fly-agaric urine-drinking tradition?
If so, all knowledge of it has certainly long been lost, while in Mexico Amanita muscaria's
Eurasiatic role as the mushroom of divine knowledge was assumed—when, we do not
know—by fungi of very different appearance and pharmacology.
What we do know is that when the hunters of bison and mammoth in the Late Pleistocene
reached and settled the country of the Rio Grande, they also discovered a new ritual
inebriant, the highly toxic, red beanlike seed of Sophora secundiflora, which their
descendants were to employ for the next 10,000 years in ecstatic-shamanistic medicine
cults, until autonomous Indian culture succumbed to Anglo-American expansionism and the
more benign peyote was adopted as the sacrament of a new, syncretistic pan-Indian
religion.

96
10. The "Diabolic Root"
The earliest hallucinogenic cactus depicted in ancient American art is a tall, columnar
member of the Cereus family, Trichocereus pachanoi, the mescaline-containing San Pedro of
the folk healers of coastal Peru (Sharon, 1972). San Pedro has been identified in the
funerary effigy pottery and painted textiles of Chavin, the oldest of a long succession of
Andean civilizations, dating to ca. 1000 BC, and also in the ceremonial art of the later
Moche and Nazca cultures, which gives this sacred psychedelic cactus of western South
America a cultural pedigree of at least 3,000 years.
But the most important, chemically and ethnographically most complex, hallucinogenic
member of the cactus family—in terms of its history, the popular, scientific, religious, and
legal attention it has drawn, and its cultural utilization from early times to the present—is a
small spineless North American native of the Chihuahuan desert, Lophophora williamsii,
better known as "peyote."
Despite its relatively restricted desert habitat, extending from the Rio Grande drainage
basin in Texas southward into the high central plateau of northern Mexico between the
eastern and western Sierra Madre mountains, to the approximate latitude of the Tropic of
Cancer, peyote was held in great esteem over much of ancient Mesoamerica, where its
earliest artistic representation—in mortuary ceramics found in western Mexico—dates to
100 BC-AD 200. It is still highly valued by many Indians, and for one indigenous population,
the Huichols, it stands as it did in pre-Hispanic times at the very center of a shamanistic
system of religion and ritual that has remained uniquely free of major Christian influences.
Finally, the divine cactus of the Huichols and of earlier peoples has evolved into the
sacrament of a new religious phenomenon, the pan-Indian peyote cult which, born out of
profound spiritual and sociocultural crisis in the nineteenth century, spread northward from
the Texas border as far as the Canadian Plains. Now it is incorporated as the Native
American Church, with an estimated 225,000 adherents. Its remarkable history, and that of
the long struggle of Indians, anthropologists, and civil libertarians to win legal status for
peyote in the face of scientifically absurd and constitutionally questionable state and federal
narcotics laws, is documented by La Barre in The Peyote Cult. First published in 1938, this
classic anthropological work has been repeatedly brought up to date and republished, most
recently in 1969 and again in 1974.* In this chapter and the next, I will attempt from
personal experience to convey something of the form and the meaning of "peyotism" in an
aboriginal Mexican setting that certainly contributed, if it was not ultimately ancestral to, its
North American manifestation.

*
The anthropological literature is rich in North American peyote studies, outstanding among them the writings of
Omer C. Stewart on Ute and Paiute peyotism, David F. Aberle's The Peyote Religion among the Navaho (1966), and
J. S. Slotkin's The Peyote Religion (1956). The latter is especially interesting because Slotkin, an anthropologist,
himself joined the Native American Church of North America and became one of its elected officials. His book was
intended, he wrote (1956:v), as a "documented exposition of Peyotism for Whites, from the Peyotist point of view."
For public support by anthropologists for religious freedom for Indian peyotists see, for example, La Barre et al.,
"Statement on Peyote," in Science (1951:582-583).

97
Photo 2 Lophophora williamsii. Peyote in flower; cultivated material from the Rio Grande of
Mexico.

A "Factory of Alkaloids"
Peyote is popularly identified with its best-known alkaloid, mescaline, but in fact mescaline
is only one of more than thirty different alkaloids that have so far been isolated, together
with their amine derivatives, from this remarkable plant, which Schultes (1972a) aptly calls
"a veritable factory of alkaloids." Most of these constituents belong to the
phenylethylamines and biogenetically related simple isoquinolines; and almost all are in one
way or another biodynamically active, with mescaline as the principal vision-inducing agent
(p. 15).* But peyote is a very complex hallucinogenic plant, whose effects include not only
brilliantly colored images as well as shimmering auras that appear to surround objects in
the natural world, but also auditory, gustatory, olfactory, and tactile sensations, together
with feelings of weightlessness, macroscopia, and alteration of space and time perception.
Because of the physiological interaction of the different alkaloids in the whole plant,
Schultes cautions against too close an equation of the effects of synthetic mescaline, such
as those described so eloquently by Aldous Huxley, with the psychic experiences of Indian
peyotists.
Although the Church did not hesitate to employ the harshest measures to banish peyote
from native use as "the diabolic root," at one point going so far as to equate its
consumption with cannibalism (!), the cult of the sacred cactus survived Colonial repression;
the supernatural and therapeutic powers anciently attributed to it remained intact. One
reason certainly was the physical isolation of some of the groups that most esteemed
peyote. The Huichols and their close cousins the Coras, for example, continued to enjoy
relative freedom from Spanish overlordship even after their rugged territory in the western
Sierra Madre was nominally brought under Colonial military and ecclesiastical sway about
1722. Missions were established but the Indians successfully resisted conversion. There was
some acculturation, but ideologically and physically the Huichols continued to be relatively
autonomous, a condition that became even more pronounced after Mexican independence.
It is this isolation from the sociological and religious mainstream of post-Conquest Mexico
that largely explains why the 10,000 Huichols preserved so much more of their pre-
European religious heritage than did other Meso-american Indians.

*
The giant saguaro cactus (Carnegiea gigantea, also known as Cereus giganteus) of the Sonoran desert in Arizona
and northern Mexico has been found to contain three alkaloids closely related to the tetrahydroisoquinoline
alkaloids in Lophophora willamsii (peyote). These are camegine, salsoidine, and gigantine, the latter said to cause
hallucinogenic reactions (Bruhn, 1971:320-329). As noted elsewhere, dopamine has also been isolated in the
stems of the saguaro. Saguaro fruit was a favorite food of the Indians of the region, who also used it to make a
potent alcoholic beverage consumed at an annual festival called, in Pima, Navaita, from navait. intoxicating drink
or wine (the Huichols call their fermented maize drink by the related term nawd). Whether the Pima, Papago and
other peoples of the area, or their prehistoric ancestors, ever made use of the alkaloid-containing saguaro stem,
for curing or other ritual purposes, is not known, but Mexican Indians to this day value close relatives of the
saguaro for their curative powers.

98
In modern Mexico peyote has long been available in many herbal markets as a highly
esteemed medicinal plant. Nor do the Huichols (who more than any other indigenous
population consider peyote sacred—indeed, divine—and who take it mainly in ceremonial
contexts) have any sanctions, legal or ethical, against its extraritual use. It is employed by
them therapeutically against a variety of physical ills, it is taken for relief from fatigue, and
it is often consumed just for its pleasurable psychic sensations. But it is never regarded
simply as a "drug," never deemed on a par with other chemicals with which the Huichols
have become increasingly familiar through the Government's medical services to even the
most remote Indians. A newspaper reporter who made the mistake of calling peyote a
"drug" while interviewing a Huichol shaman in my presence was indignantly told, "As-pirina
is a drug, peyote is sacred," and warned not to confuse such important matters.

"Mescaline": A Misnomer
I should mention here that not only "mescaline" but also "peyote" are actually misnomers.
Lophophora williamsii, sometimes called "mescal button" (hence "mescaline") has nothing
whatever to do with the species of agave from which the potent liquors known as mescal
and tequila are distilled. "Peyote" itself derives from the Aztec peyoti, a term that was
applied not just to Lophopora williamsii but also to several other unrelated plants with
medicinal properties. The Huichols call the sacred cactus hikuri, and since they share this
term with several other peoples belonging to the Uto-Aztecan or Nahua language family,
hikuri is probably the correct aboriginal name.
That peyote, like coca (Erythroxylon coca) in the Andes, is an effective stimulant against
fatigue has been known for some time. For this we have, among others, the testimony of
Carl Lumholtz (1902), the Norwegian pioneer ethnographer of the Huichols and other
Mexican Indians, who traveled widely in the Sierra Madre in the 1890's. On one occasion,
totally exhausted at the bottom of a deep canyon after a long trek and unable to walk
another step (to make matters worse he had just recovered from a bout with malaria), he
was given a single hikuri by his Huichol friends:
The effect was almost instantaneous, and I ascended the hill quite easily,
resting now and then to draw a full breath of air. (pp. 178-179)
More interesting still are recent laboratory tests confirming that when the Indians call
peyote "medicine" it was not in terms just of supernatural power ("medicine power" in
Plains Indian terminology) but rather of actual medication. Researchers at the University of
Arizona isolated a crystalline substance from an ethanol extract of peyote which, they
found, exhibited antibiotic activity against a wide spectrum of bacteria and a species of the
imperfect fungi, including strains of penicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (McLeary, et
at., 1960:247-249).
The Huichols, to whom peyote is synonymous with and qualitatively equivalent to the divine
deer or supernatural Master of the Deer Species, take the hallucinogenic plant mainly in two
forms. One is the fresh cactus itself, whole or cut into pieces, in which form it is equivalent
to the flesh of the deer. The other is the cactus macerated or ground on a metate and
mixed with water. The latter combination symbolizes, among other meanings, the symbiosis
or interdependence of the dry season and the wet, hunting and agriculture, and male and
female (cactus and deer being male and water female).

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The Sacred Quest for Peyote
Peyote is not native to the Sierra Madre, so that the Indians have to travel long distances to
obtain the necessary supplies—for the ceremonies, personal use, and trade to Indian
neighbors. While this pilgrimage is by far the most sacred enterprise in the annual
ceremonial cycle and also serves as a rite of initiation, not every Huichol adult has been a
participant, nor can it even be said that everyone has tasted peyote. The pilgrimage is not
required, but like that of the devout Moslem to Mecca, it is a sacred task, fraught with
enormous potential benefit for one's own life and the welfare of one's kin, a task to which
many Indians aspire at least once, to which would-be shamans must commit themselves a
minimum of five times, and which some of the oldest and most traditional have repeated as
many as ten, twenty, or, in rare instances, even thirty times over their lifetime.
For at the end of that long and arduous trail, 300 miles northeast of Huichol territory, in the
high desert of San Luis Potosi, lies Wirikuta, the mythic place of origin. Here dwell the
supernaturals known as the Kakauyarixi, the Ancient Ones, divine ancestors, in their sacred
places. Here the hikuri, the magic cactus, manifests itself as Elder Brother Deer, the
mediator whose divine flesh enables not just the elect, the shaman, but also the ordinary
Huichol to transcend the limitations of the human condition—"to find his life," as the Indians
say.

Mythic Origins of Peyote

I remember one elderly mara'akame (the Huichol term meaning both curing and singing
shaman and sacrificing priest) of great renown, of whom it was said that he had made this
difficult journey no less than 32 times—on foot! Walking in both directions was the
traditional way, but nowadays most Huichol peyoteros make use of whatever transportation
is available—autos, trucks, buses, horse-drawn wagons, even the train. This is acceptable
so long as all the sacred places along the way are properly acknowledged with offerings and
prayer, and all other ritual requirements are fulfilled. The pattern was established long ago,
in mythic times, when the Great Shaman, Fire, addressed as Tatewari, Our Grandfather, led
the ancestral gods on the first peyote quest. It is told that the fire god came upon them as
they sat in a circle in the Huichol temple, each complaining of a different ailment. Asked to
divine the cause of their ills, the Great Shaman, Fire, said they were suffering because they
had not gone to hunt the divine Deer (Peyote) in Wirikuta, as their own ancestors had done,
and so had been deprived of the healing powers of its miraculous flesh. It was decided to
take up bow and arrow and to follow Tatewari to "find their lives" in the distant land of the
Deer-Peyote.
These gods were male, but true to Huichol belief that only unification and proper balance of
male and female guarantees life, along the way, at the sacred water holes in the desert the
Huichols call Tateimatinieri, Place of Our Mothers, they were joined by the female
component of the Huichol pantheon, the Mother Goddesses of terrestrial water and rain, and
of the fertility and fecundity of the earth and all the phenomena of nature, including
humanity. In their animal aspect these mother goddesses are snakes, a symbolic
identification the present-day Huichols share with pre-Hispanic peoples.
Every Huichol is completely familiar with this peyote tradition and the sacred itinerary. Each
year, when the first ears of maize and the first young squashes have ripened in the fields, a
lengthy ceremony is held for the youngest children, who are equated with the first fruits of
agriculture, and for whom the shaman-elder of the kin group recites the story in repetitive
song to the accompaniment of his magic drum.

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I participated in two peyote pilgrimages, in 1966 and again in 1968. What follows is
essentially based on the second of these, when we transported sixteen Huichols, including
four women and three children, the youngest only seven days old at the outset, from
Nayarit in western Mexico to Wirikuta in two motor vehicles.* Both these pilgrimages were
led by the late Ramón Medina Silva, a charismatic, gifted artist and shaman who had lived
for some years on the fringes of traditional Huichol subsistence-farming society but who was
nonetheless firmly committed to the validity of Huichol religion and tradition. The 1968
pilgrimage was his fifth, culminating his self-training as a mara'akdme. He was to lead two
more, one entirely on foot (in fulfillment of a commitment to the divine ancestors for curing
his wife Lupe of rheumatoid arthritis), before his tragic death in June 1971 in a shooting
incident during a fiesta to celebrate the clearing of Sierra forest land for a new maize plot.
Such fiestas customarily involve much drinking and it was this that led to his death. He was
then about 45 years old.
As the German ethnographer Konrad Theodor Preuss (1908) observed earlier in this
century, Huichol shamanism and ritual, while sharing many basic elements, tend toward the
idiosyncratic in actual performance, and no two shamans, even from the same community,
are likely to agree entirely on a single rendition of a particular tradition. Nonetheless, the
basic structure remains. So it was with Ramón's version of the peyote quest: here and there
it differed from others that have been described to me, but in its essentials it conforms
remarkably well to those recounted, on the basis of informants' statements, by Lumholtz
and more recent students of Huichol culture.

Photo 3 Ramón. The leader of the peyote quest described in these pages, using his hunting bow
as ritual musical instrument. This is the same weapon with which the sacred cactus, identified with
the deer deity, is "hunted" and sacrificially slain.

"We Are Newly Born"

Absolutely essential to the physical and metaphysical success of the sacred peyote
enterprise is a rite of sexual purification, intended to return the pilgrims to a state of
prenatal innocence. It requires all those present, men and women, to identify by name and
in public each and every sexual partner since puberty. This applies even to those who will
not actually make the journey but remain behind to keep the divine hearth fire—one of the
manifestations of the fire deity—burning for the duration of the pilgrimage.

*
For other first-hand data on the peyote pilgrimage see Barbara G. Myerhoffs The Peyote Hunt (1974), an
excellent anthropological analysis of the whole deer-com-peyote symbol complex, and Femando Benitez, In the
Magic Land of Peyote (1975), a sympathetic and insightful chronicle of the pilgrimage and its meaning by a
well-known Mexican historian-journalist. Dr. Myerhoffs book deals with the 1966 peyote hunt, in which we were
both privileged to be "participant observers."

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To appreciate this one has to know that the polygamous Huichols, while espousing the ideal
of marital fidelity, are not especially noted for adhering to it, that the participants are
usually drawn from the same small community, commonly from households more or less
closely related by blood or marriage, and that the attentive audience more likely than not
includes the very sexual partners whose names are publicly proclaimed. Yet it is an absolute
requirement that no one present, be it husband, wife, or lover, must show the slightest sign
of anger or jealousy. Indeed, such feelings must be banished from one's innermost being—
"one's heart," as the Indians say—and the confessions must be received with good humor,
even high spirits. Hence, instead of recriminations or tears, in the two sexual purification
rites which we attended there were laughter, shouts of encouragement, and sometimes
joking reminders from husbands, wives, and other relatives of love affairs inadvertently or
deliberately omitted.
As officiating shaman and manifestation of the old Fire God Tatewan (who is also present in
the ceremonial fire around which the group assembles as personators of the original, divine
pilgrims of mythic times—for each peyote pilgrimage reenacts the first quest for the divine
cactus), it was Ramón's task to accept the confession of sexuality and "unmake"—i.e.
reverse—the pilgrim's passage through life to adulthood and return him or her symbolically
to infancy and a state akin to that of spirit. The Huichols say: "We have become new, we
are clean, we are newly born."
The tender state of the "newborn" pilgrims is also symbolized in a knotted string that ties
the pilgrims symbolically to one another and, through their shaman, to the Earth Mother
herself. As though tying off the umbilicus, the shaman ties one knot for each companion and
then rolls the cord into a spiral which he attaches to the back of his hunting bow. This spiral
is metaphor for the journey to "the place of origin" and the subsequent return to "this
world"—i.e. death and rebirth.
The symbolic navel cord whose knots will be untied upon their return from Wirikuta must
not be confused either with the knotted calendar cord mentioned by Lumholtz (but omitted
in our two pilgrimages), or with yet another knotted string that plays a crucial role in the
obliteration of adult sexuality. This cord is one into which the shaman has "tied" everyone's
sexual experience and whose sacrifice by fire completes the purification rite.

The Dangerous Passage

Having symbolically shed their adulthood and human identity the pilgrims can now truly
assume the identity of spirits, for just as their leader is Tatewari, the Fire God and First
Shaman, so they become the ancestral deities who followed him on the primordial hunt for
the Deer-Peyote. In fact, it is only when one has become spirit that one is able to "cross
over"—that is, pass safely through the dangerous passage, the gateway of Clashing Clouds
that divides the ordinary from the nonordinary world. This is one of several Huichol versions
of a near-universal theme in funerary, heroic, and shamanistic mythology.
That this extraordinary symbolic passage is today located only a few yards from a heavily
traveled highway on the outskirts of the city of Zacatecas seemed to matter not at all to the
Huichols, who in any case acted throughout the sacred journey as though the twentieth
century and all its technological wonders had never happened, even when they themselves
were traveling by motor vehicle rather than on foot! Indeed, to us nothing illustrated more
dramatically the time-out-of-life quality of the whole peyote experience than this ritual of
passing through a perilous gateway that existed only in the emotions of the participants, but
that was to them no less real for its physical invisibility.

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We arrived at the outskirts of Zacatecas in midmorning. Assembling in their proper order as
decreed in ancient times by Tatewan, the pilgrims proceeded in single file to a grove of low-
growing cactus and thorn bushes a few hundred feet from the highway. They listened with
rapt attention as Ramón related the relevant passages of the peyote tradition and invoked
for the coming ordeal the protection and assistance of Elder Brother Kauyumarie, a deer
deity and culture hero who is the shaman's spirit helper. At Ramón's direction, each then
took a small green and red parrot feather from a bunch attached to the straw hat of a
matewdme (one who has not previously gone on a peyote pilgrimage, i.e. an initiated
neophyte), and tied it to the branches of a thorn bush in a propitiatory rite that has
analogies among the Southwestern Pueblos.
Some distance up the road the pilgrims were led to an open space that commanded a fine
view of the valley from which we had come. Here they formed a semicircle; men to Ramón's
left, women and children to the right. Although they knew the peyote traditions by heart
they listened carefully as he told them how, with the assistance of Kauyumarie's antlers,
they would soon pass through the dangerous Gateway of Clashing Clouds. But from now
until they arrived at the Place Where Our Mothers Dwell, the matewdmete (pl.) among them
would have to "walk in darkness," for they were "new and very delicate." Beginning with the
women at the tail end of the line, Ramón proceeded to blindfold the novices. Even the
children had their eyes covered, down to the baby.
Everyone took the blindfolding very seriously, some actually wept, but there were also the
quick shifts between solemnity and humor that are so characteristic of Huichol ceremonial.
Spirited and comical dialogues ensued between Ramón and veterans of previous
pilgrimages: was the companion well fed, had he quenched his thirst? Oh yes, one's
stomach was full to bursting with all manner of good things to eat and drink. Did one's feet
hurt after so much walking? Oh no, one walked well, in comfort. (In reality none had had
more than the most meager nourishment, only five dry tortillas per day and no water at all
being permitted on the road to Wirikuta. As for walking, we were of course traveling by car,
although the proper acknowledgement of various sacred places along the way repeatedly
required single-file marches in and out of the desert).
Following the ritual blindfolding, Ramón led the pilgrims a few hundred years
northeastward. Here, a place entirely unremarkable to the untutored eye, was the mystical
divide, the threshold to the divine peyote country. The pilgrims remained rooted where they
stood, intently watching Ramón's every move. Some lit candles they had stored in their
carrying bags and baskets. Lips moved in silent or barely audible supplication. Ramón bent
down and laid his bow and arrows crosswise over his oblong takwdtsi, the plaited shaman's
basket—bow and deerskin quiver pointing east in the direction of Wirikuta.
There are two stages to the crossing of the critical threshold. The first is called Gateway to
the Clouds; the second, Where the Clouds Open. They are only a few steps apart, but the
emotional impact on the participants as they passed from one to the other was
unmistakable. Once safely "on the other side," they knew they would travel through a series
of ancestral stopping places to the sacred maternal water holes, where one asks for fertility
and fecundity and from where the novices, their blindfolds removed, are allowed to have
their first glimpse of the distant mountains of Wirikuta. Of course, one would search in vain
on any official map for places that bear such names as Where the Clouds Open, The Vagina,
Where Our Mothers Dwell, or even Wirikuta itself, either in Huichol or Spanish. Like other
sacred spots on the peyote itinerary, these are landmarks only in the geography of the
mind.

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Visually, the passage through the Gateway of Clashing Clouds was un-dramatic. Ramón
stepped forward, lifted the bow and, placing one end against the mouth while rhythmically
beating the taut string with a composite wooden-tipped hunting arrow, walked straight
ahead. He stopped once, gestured (to Kauyumarie, we were later told, to thank him for
holding the cloud gates back with his powerful antlers), and set out again at a more rapid
pace, all the while beating his bow. The others followed close behind in single file. Some of
the blindfolded neophytes held fearfully on to those in front, others made it by themselves.

"Where Our Mothers Dwell"

It was in the afternoon of the following day that we reached the sacred water holes of Our
Mothers, the novices having remained blindfolded all the while. The physical setting again
was hardly inspiring: an impoverished mestizo pueblo and beyond it a small cluster of
obviously polluted springs surrounded by marsh—all that remained of a former lake long
since gone dry. Cattle and a pig or two browsing amid the sacred water holes hardly helped
inspire confidence in the physical—as opposed to spiritual—purity of the water the Huichols
considered the very wellspring of fertility and fecundity. On the peyote quest, however, it is
not what we would consider the real world that matters but only the reality of the mind's
eye. "It is beautiful here," say the Huichols, "because this is where Our Mothers dwell, this
is the water of life."
For some time, while the veteran peyoteros busied themselves in ritual activities, the
blindfolded matewdmete were made to sit quietly on the earth in a row, knees drawn up
and arms held tightly against the body—the fetal position. Then at last the moment came
when they could emerge into the light—i.e. be born—by the removal of their blindfolds. As
Ramón did this in a separate ritual for each that included the same sort of jocular dialogue
as had marked the dangerous passage, he also poured an ice-cold bowl of water taken from
one of the springs over their heads, instructing them to rub the fecund fluid deeply into
scalp and face. A second gourdful was handed them to drink, along with presoaked animal
crackers and bits of tortilla, "for they are new, they can only eat tender food."
Offerings were left in the springs and numerous bottles and other containers filled with the
precious water. The manner in which this filling was accomplished unmistakably celebrated
the union of male and female, for Ramón and other peyoteros would dip a hunting arrow
into a water hole and on its hardwood tip withdraw a few drops; the arrow would then be
inserted into a waiting bottle and the drops shaken off in a motion simulating sexual
intercourse. With this all ritual requirements preparatory to the actual hunt—bow and arrow
in hand—for Elder Brother Deer-Peyote had been fulfilled. The water would first be taken to
Wirikuta and then home, for use in the peyote rites and other ceremonies, and to be
sprinkled with sprays of flowers over the women and even female livestock by the returning
pilgrims, a symbolic act of fertilization that reminds one of the pre-Hispanic tradition in
which the Toltec ruler Mixcoati fathers the priest-king and culture hero Quetzalcoati by
impregnating his wife with the spray of flowers (an alternate version speaks of a jewel of
jade). The contents of the springs of Our Mothers are thus seen to embody both male and
female aspects.

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11. "To Find Our Life": Peyote Hunt Of The Huichols Of
Mexico
The description of the peyote pilgrimage in Chapters Ten and Eleven appeared
earlier in somewhat different form in Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of
Hallucinogens, Peter T. Furst, ed. (© 1972 by Praeger Publishers, Inc.), and
in a briefer version in 1973 in Natural History, Vol. LXXXII, No. 4, pp. 34-43,
and is included here with the permission of the publishers.
Wirikuta is typical Chihuahuan-type desert, with an average altitude of 5,000 feet, covered
with creosote bush, mesquite, tar bush, yucca, agave, and many other kinds of cactus. It
does the Huichols no favor to pinpoint the peyote country more precisely than to say that it
overlaps more or less with the old mining Real of Catorce in northwestern San Luis Potosi;
as it is, we were told by a railroad crew close to the sacred mountains that the year before a
group of bearded young men and their girls had pitched tents nearby and lived there for
several weeks, harvesting and eating peyote. This intelligence disturbed Ramón greatly,
because the cactus grows slowly and such mass consumption by non-Indians was bound to
have serious consequences for the success of future peyote hunts by those to whom the
little cactus is, quite literally, the "source of life." Between the Place of Our Mothers and the
peyote country proper there were to be two more camps. The second was only ten miles (in
this rugged desert, two hours' driving time) from the area Ramón had selected in his mind
for the hunt of Elder Brother Wawatsari, the "Principal Deer," who is animal avatar of
peyote. We broke camp before dawn, in bitter cold, waiting only for the first red glow in the
east so that the pilgrims might pay their proper respect to the rising Sun Father and ask his
protection. There was little conversation on this final stretch. Everyone remained still,
except for the times when the vehicles had to be emptied of passengers to get past a
particularly difficult spot in the trail. Even then there were few unnecessary words. Ramón's
wife Lupe and her uncle Jose lit candles the moment we started out and held them the
entire distance.

A Time to Walk
It was just past 7:00 A.M. when Ramón stopped the cars and told the Indians to get out and
assemble in single file by the side of the trail. It was time to walk. For no matter how one
had traveled thus far, one must enter and leave the "Patio of the Grandfathers" exactly as
had Tatewari and his ancient pilgrims—on foot, blowing a horn and beating the hunting
bow. In former times, and occasionally today, the horn was a conch shell; Jose's was goat
horn, and one of the others used a cow-horn trumpet.
As the hikuri seekers walked they picked up bits of dry wood and branches of creosote.
Little Francisco, age ten, who was carrying his two-year-old brother, stopped to break off a
green branch for himself and also stuck a long dry stick in the little boy's hand. This was the
food of Tatewari. It is another mark of the total unity of the hikuritdmete (peyoteros) that
each companion, down to the youngest, is expected to participate in the first "feeding" of
the ceremonial Fire when it is brought to life by the mara'akdme.

105
This happened so quickly that we almost missed it. The line stopped, Ramón squatted, and
seconds later there was a wisp of blue smoke and a tiny flame. Tatewari had been "brought
out" (fire is inherent in wood and only needs "bringing out"). Now more than at any other
time on the pilgrimage, speed and skill in starting the fire are of the essence, for one is in
precarious balance in this sacred land and urgently requires the manifestation of Tatewari
for protection. The fire is allowed to go out only at the end, when sacred water is poured on
the hot ashes, after which the mara'akame selects a coal, the kupuri (soul, life force) of
Tatewari, and places it in the little ceremonial bag around his neck. Since the ritual is
repeated at each campsite there is an accumulation of magic coals, which become part of
the mara'akame's array of power objects.

Food for Grandfather

Chanting and praying, Ramón piled up bits of brush which quickly caught fire. The others,
meanwhile, arranged themselves in a circle with their pieces of firewood and began to pray
with great fervor and obvious emotion. We saw tears course down Lupe's face, and there
was much sobbing also among the others. Such ritualized manifestations of joy mixed with
sorrow were to recur several times during our stay in Wirikuta, especially at the successful
conclusion of the "hunt," and again when we were getting ready to take our final leave.
After much praying, chanting, and gesturing with firewood in the sacred directions, and a
countersunwise ceremonial circuit around the fire, the individual gifts of "food" were given
to Tatewari and everyone went off to prepare for the crucial pursuit of the Deer-Peyote.
It was midmorning when Ramón signaled the beginning of the hunt. To my question how far
we would have to walk to find peyote, he replied, "Far, very far. Tamatsi Wawatsari, the
Principal Deer, waits for us up there, on the slopes of the mountain." I judged the distance
to be about three miles.
Everyone gathered up his offerings and stuffed them in bags and baskets. Bowstrings were
tested. Catarino Rios, the personator of Tatutsi (Great-grandfather), one of the principal
supernaturals, stopped playing his bow to help his wife Veradera (Our Mother Haramara,
the Pacific Ocean) cut a few loose strings from the little votive design she had made from
colored yam on a piece of wood coated with beeswax, to be given as a petition to the
sacrificed Deer-Peyote. The design depicted a calf. Catarino's bow music, we were told, was
to make the deer happy before his impending death. Ramón conducted the pilgrims in
another circuit around the fire, during which everyone laid more "food" on the flames and
pleaded for protection. Ramón entreated Tatewari not to go out and to greet them on their
return. Then he led the companions away from camp toward the distant hills.

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The Ritual Kill
About 300 feet from camp we crossed a railroad track and beyond it a barbed-wire fence.
The men had their bows and arrows ready. Everyone had shoulder bags and some had
baskets as well, containing offerings. We had walked perhaps 500 feet when Ramón lifted
his fingers to his lips in a warning of silence, placed an arrow on his bowstring, and
motioned to the others to fan out quickly and quietly in a wide arc. I pointed to the distant
rise—was that not where we would find the peyote? He shook his head and smiled. Of
course, I had forgotten the reversals of meaning that are a part of ritual language on the
peyote pilgrimage. When he had said, "Far, very far," he really meant "very close." Ramón
now crept forward, crouching low, intently watching the ground. Catarino's bow, which he
had sounded by beating the string with an arrow along the route "to please Elder Brother,"
fell silent. The women hung back. Ramón halted suddenly, pointed to the ground, and
whispered urgently, "His tracks, his tracks!" I could see nothing. Jose, personator of
Tayaupa, Sun Father, sneaked up close and nodded happy assent: "Yes, yes, mara'akdme,
there amid the new maize, there are his tracks, there at the first level." (There are five
conceptual levels, corresponding to the four cardinal points—east, south, west, and north,
with zenith and nadir combined into a single fifth direction rather than being counted
separately as among the Zuni. For a man to reach the fifth level, as Ramón was to do here
in Wirikuta, means he has "completed himself—i.e., become shaman.) The "new maize" was
a sad little stand of dried-up twigs. The hunters look for any growth that can be associated
with stands of maize, for the deer is not only peyote but maize as well. Likewise, peyote is
differentiated by "color," corresponding to the five sacred colors of maize—blue, red, yellow,
white, and multicolored.

Photo 4 "There, there, the deer!" A clone of peyote, the gray green crowns barely extending
above ground. Photographed in the north central desert of Mexico.

Ramón moved forward once more, Jose following close behind and to one side, his face lit
up with the pleasure of discovery and anticipation. All at once Ramón stopped, motioning
urgently to the others to come close. About 20 feet ahead stood a small shrub. He pointed:
"There, there, the Deer!" Barely visible above ground under the bush were some flecks of
dusty green—evidently a whole cluster of Lophophora williamsii. Although I have seen
peyote plants growing in full sunlight, more often it is found like this—in a thicket of
mesquite or creosote, shaded by a yucca or Euphorbia (especially Euphorbia antisyphilitica),
or close to some well-armed Opuntia cactus, such as rabbit ear or cholla. Its broad, flat
crown is usually almost level with the earth and so is easily missed by the inexperienced
eye).

107
Ramón took aim, and the first of his arrows buried itself a fraction of an inch from the crown
of the nearest hikuri. He let fly with a second, which hit slightly to one side. Jose ran
forward and fired a third, almost straight down. Ramón completed the "kill' by sticking a
ceremonial arrow with pendant hawk feathers into the ground on the far side, so that the
sacred plant was now enclosed by arrows in each of the world quarters. The mara'akame
bent down to examine the peyote. "Look there," he said, "how sacred it is, how beautiful,
the five-pointed deer!" Remarkably, every one of the peyotes in the cluster had the same
number of ribs—five, the sacred number of completion! Later on, Ramón was to string a
whole series of "five-pointed" peyotes on a sisal fiber cord and drape it over the horns of
Kauyumarie mounted on the vehicles.
The companions formed a circle around the place where Elder Brother lay "dying." Many
sobbed. All prayed loudly. The one called Tatutsf, Great-grandfather, unwrapped Ramón's
basket of power objects, the takwdtsi, from the red kerchief in which it was kept and laid it
open for Ramón's use in the complex and lengthy rituals of propitiation of the dead deer
(peyote) and division of its flesh among the communicants. Ramón explained how the
kupuri, the life essence of the deer, which, as with humans, resides in the fontanelle, was
"rising, rising, rising, like a brilliantly colored rainbow, seeking to escape to the top of the
sacred mountains." "Do not be angry, Elder Brother," Ramón implored, "do not punish us
for killing you, for you have not really died. You will rise again." Ramón was echoed by the
pilgrims. "We will feed you well, for we have brought you many offerings, we have brought
you tobacco, we have brought you water from Our Mothers, we have brought you arrows,
we have brought you votive gourds, we have brought you maize and your favorite grasses,
we have brought you tamales, we have brought you our prayers. We honor you and we give
you our devotion. Take them, Elder Brother, take them and give us our life. We offer our
devotion to the Kakauyarixi who live here in Wirikuta; we have come to be received by
them, for we know they await us. We have come from afar to greet you."

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A Huichol Communion
To push the rainbow -kupuri, which only he could see, back into the Deer, Ramón lifted his
muvieri (shaman's prayer arrow), first to the sky and the world directions, and then pressed
it slowly downward, as though with great force, until the hawk feathers touched the crown
of the sacred plant. In his chant he described how all around the dead deer peyotes were
springing up, growing from his horns, his back, his tail, his shins, his hooves. "Tamatsi
Wawatsari," he said, "is giving us our life." He took his knife from the basket and began to
cut away the earth around the cactus. Then, instead of taking it out whole, he cut it off at
the base, leaving a bit of the root in the ground. This is done so that Elder Brother can grow
again from his "bones."* Ramón sliced off the tough bottom half of the cactus and peeled
away the rough brown skin, carefully preserving the waste for ritual disposition later. Then
he divided the cactus into five pieces by cutting along the natural ridges and placed these
pieces in a votive gourd. The process was repeated by Ramón and Lupe with several
additional plants, for there had to be enough to give each of the companions a part of "Elder
Brother's flesh." Those who had made previous pilgrimages came first. One by one they
squatted or knelt before Ramón, who removed a section of peyote from the gourd and, after
touching it to the pilgrim's forehead (in lieu of the fontanelle hidden under the hat or scarf),
eyes, larynx, and heart, placed it into his or her mouth. The pilgrim was told to "chew it
well, chew it well, for thus you will see your life." Then he summoned the non-Huichol
observers and repeated the same ritual for them (as he had also included them in the
knotting-in ceremony).
In the meantime Ramón had gathered up all the tobacco gourds (yekwete) belonging to the
pilgrims and placed them near the sacred cavities from which the peyote had been taken.
As Lumholtz (1900:190) noted, these gourds are an indispensable part of the outfit of the
hikuri seeker, giving him, as it were, priestly status (the tobacco gourd was also a priestly
insignia in Aztec times). I have heard it said that ye, tobacco, was once a hawk and the
kw'e, gourd, a snake. The tobacco is always the so-called wild species, Nicotiani rustica—the
"tobacco of Tatewan—which contains nicotine in far greater amounts than some domestic
brands. Tobacco gourds are specially raised for the purpose. Those with numerous natural
excrescences are highly valued, although smooth ones are also employed, sometimes with a
covering of skin from the scrotum of a deer. This, of course, makes them especially
powerful.

*
Anderson (1969), who has been engaged in extensive field studies of Lophophora throughout its natural range
from Texas to San Luis Potosi and Queretaro since 1957, reports that "injury or harvesting by man induces the
formation of many stems from a single rootstock. Single clones of more than 1.5 m. across have been observed in
San Luis Potosi, for example" (p. 302). The ritual practice of leaving part of the rootstock in the ground to induce
new growth "from Elder Brother's bones" is common among Huichol peyote seekers. Clones growing from a single
rootstock are considered especially sacred and powerful and are treated accordingly. Ramón, for example, would
not allow anyone else to touch one such clone he had removed from the ground until it had been propitiated in the
proper manner. Characteristically, he left part of the root where it grew.

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All the hikuri that had "grown from the horns and body of Elder Brother" had been dug up
and set on the ground. Bows and arrows were stacked against a nearby cactus. Votive
offerings and prayers addressed to the Deer and the Kakauyarixi were placed in a pile in
front of the holes where the peyote had been. The pilgrims were seated on the ground in a
circle. Ramón touched the offerings with his muvieri, prayed, and set fire to one of the little
wool yam paintings he had made, depicting Elder Brother. As the wax melted, the flames
licked at the ceremonial arrows, and soon the entire pile of offerings and the dry creosote
bush itself were ablaze. Ramón muttered incantations and with his muvieri wafted some of
the smoke toward the sacred mountains. Then he rose and with a gourd filled with peyote
passed in a ceremonial circuit from right to left on the inside of the circle to give each his
portion of "Elder Brother's flesh." Forehead, eyes, larynx, and heart were touched and the
peyote placed into the mouth of each pilgrim in turn. The matewdmete especially were
exhorted over and over to "chew it well, brother [or sister], so that you will see your life, so
that it will appear to you with clarity." When Ramón came to ten-year-old Francisco, all
turned to watch. Peyote is not given in any quantity to young children, but after the age of
three it can be a sign whether or not the child has the disposition to become a mara'akame.
If he or she likes the taste, which is exceedingly bitter and difficult to tolerate, it is taken as
a positive omen. If it is rejected, it is a negative sign—though not necessarily definitive.
Ramón touched Francisco on the head, eyes, throat, and heart and placed a small piece
between his lips. "Chew, little brother," he admonished, "and we will see how you like it.
Chew well, chew well, for it is sweet, it is delicious to the taste." There were smiles at this
obvious reversal but no laughter—this was not a time for hilarity. After slight hesitation
Francisco, who had not tasted peyote before, began to chew vigorously. He nodded—yes, he
liked it. Later he participated with great enthusiasm in the search for peyote and that night
ate a goodly amount himself, with no visible ill effect. He danced for hours, fell asleep
smiling happily, and next morning was his old self. One matewame who was obviously
greatly moved by the whole experience was Veradera, a strikingly handsome young woman
apparently under twenty. Veradera ate more peyote than anyone with the exception of
Ramón and Lupe, and later that night fell into a deep trance that lasted for many hours and
caused everyone to regard her as especially sacred.

"You Will See Your Life"

When every one of the companions had chewed a piece of the first sacrificial hikuri, Ramón
took out his fiddle and one of the others a guitar (both homemade), and the veterans stood
aside in a group to sing and dance the matewdmete into a "receptive condition." In the
meantime, another gourd had been filled with peyote cut into small pieces, and the initiates
were not allowed to rise until they had emptied it. As the bowl was handed around, the
others, led by Ramón, exhorted them over and over to "chew well, companion, chew well,
for that is how you will see your life." Lupe then took a sizable whole plant, sliced off the
bottom, lifted her long, magnificently embroidered skirt (like Ramón's clothes, it had been
made specially for this journey), and rubbed the moist end of the cactus on her legs,
especially on the numerous small scratches and cuts inflicted by spines and thorns during
the trek through the desert. The others followed her example. Lupe explained that peyote
not only discourages hunger and thirst and restores one's spirit but heals wounds and
prevents infection.

110
Photo 5 Veradera. "We are all the children of a brilliantly colored flower, a flaming flower… ."

Ramón having admonished the companions repeatedly to "be of a pure heart," the actual
hikuri harvest was ready to commence, and the pilgrims went off into the desert, alone or in
pairs. Hikuri "hides itself well," and several of the companions had to walk a considerable
distance before seeing their first peyote. Lupe, on the other hand, almost at once
discovered a thicket of cactus and mesquite so rich in peyote that in a couple of hours she
had filled her tall collecting basket. Occasionally she would stop to admire and speak quietly
to an especially beautiful hikuri and to touch it to her forehead, face, throat, and heart
before adding it to the others. We also saw people exchanging gifts of peyote. This seemed
to us a very beautiful aspect of the pilgrimage. No ceremony in which peyote was eaten
communally went by without this kind of ritual exchange, in which each participant is
expected to share his peyote with every companion. A man or a woman would carefully
divide a peyote, rise, and walk from individual to individual, handing over a piece and
receiving one in return. Often an older participant would place his gift directly into the
mouth of a younger one, urging him to "chew well, younger brother, chew well, so that you
will see your life." But most often these ritual exchanges took place in silence as they were
also to do in the concluding ceremony of "unknotting" that marked the formal end of the
pilgrimage.

Photo 6 "Our game bags are full." Lupe's carrying basket filled to the brim with mature peyote
plants. In the foreground, peyote roots, called the "bones" of the sacred cactus, cut off to be
ritually deposited in the desert in the hope that new plants will grow from them. This accords with
the widespread belief of hunting peoples in rebirth from the bones, which are believed to contain
the life force or soul.

111
No hikuri was ever dug carelessly or dropped casually on the ground or into a basket or
bag. On the contrary, it was handled with tenderness and respect and addressed soothingly
by the hikuri seeker, who would thank it for allowing itself to be seen, call it by endearing
names, and apologize for removing it from its home. As mentioned, small, tender, five-
ribbed ("five-pointed") plants are considered especially desirable. Being young, they are
also less disagreeable to the taste. Some plants were cleaned and popped directly into the
mouth—after first being held to forehead, face, and heart. Lupe sometimes wept when she
did this. She was also chewing incessantly, as was Ramón.
Toward four in the afternoon Ramón rose from where he had been digging peyotes and
called out that it was time to return to camp. One of the hikuri seekers had just spotted a
sizable cluster and was reluctant to abandon so rich a find. Ramón admonished him: "Our
game bags are full. One must not take more than one needs." If one did, if one did not
leave gifts and propitiate the slain Deer-Peyote (just as one should propitiate the spirits of
animals one hunts, the maize one harvests, and the trees one cuts). Elder Brother would be
offended and would conceal the hikuri or withdraw them altogether, so that next time the
seekers would walk away empty-handed. We would call this practice conservation; to the
Huichol it is part of the principle of reciprocity by which he orders his social relationships
and his relationship to the natural and supernatural environment. So the pilgrims gathered
their gear and their bags and baskets, now heavy with peyote, and after a tearful farewell
returned to camp as they had come, walking single file to the sound of the bow. On the way
they stopped here and there to pick up "food" for Tatewari.
On arriving at camp they made the usual ceremonial circuit around the fire and offered
thanks for its protection, without laying down their burdens. Again there was much
weeping. Ramón's basket, held in one arm while he gestured in the sacred directions with
the other, must have weighed a good thirty pounds. Though dormant, the ashes were still
aglow, and new flames quickly licked through the growing pile of brush as each deposited
some "food" for Tatewari. The green branches, wet with dew, sent thick clouds of white
smoke billowing to the leaden sky. It was turning cold and damp.

112
The night was passed in singing and dancing around the ceremonial fire, chewing peyote in
astounding quantities, and listening to the ancient stories. Considering the lack of food, the
long days on the road, the bitterly cold nights with little sleep (by now, Ramón had not
closed his eyes to sleep for six days and nights!), and above all the high emotional pitch of
the sacred drama, with its succession of increasingly intense and exalted encounters, one
might have expected the pilgrims to feel some letdown now that they had successfully
"hunted the deer" and to lapse into a dream state induced by the considerable quantities of
hikuri they had already consumed. True, after their return from the hunt they were, for the
most part, somewhat subdued and quiet. Some had actually entered trances. Veradera had
been sitting motionless for hours, arms clasped around her knees, eyes closed. When night
fell Lupe placed candles around her to protect her against attacks by sorcerers while her
soul was traveling outside her body. But most of the others were wide awake, in varying
states of exaltation, supremely happy and possessed of seemingly boundless energy. If the
dancing and singing stopped it was only because Ramón laid down his fiddle to commune
quietly with the ceremonial fire or to chant the stories of the first peyote pilgrims and the
primordial hunt of the divine Deer-Peyote. It is also in this semi-conscious peyote dream
state that the mara'akdme "obtains" the new peyote names for the pilgrims in his charge
(e.g. Offering of the Blue Maize, Votive Gourd of the Sun, Arrows of Tatewan'). These
names, I was told, emerge from the core of the fire in the manner of brilliantly colored,
luminous ribbons, and it is in this form that Ramón subsequently depicted them in his
superbly fashioned "paintings" of wool yam, an art form for which the Huichols are justly
famed and in which he in particular excelled far beyond most other Huichol artists of his
time. The special peyote names are conferred on the hikuri-seekers on the last day in
Wirikuta and are evidently preserved by them at least until they are formally released from
their sacred bonds and restrictions by the ceremonial circuit to the sacred places and the
deer hunt that follow their return to the Sierra.

Photo 7 Hikuuri seekers. A Huichol peyotero and his wife searching the desert for the sacred
cactus.

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Uniqueness of the Shaman's Visions
The Huichols say their peyote experiences are very private things and they do not often
discuss them with outsiders except in the most general terms ("there were many beautiful
colors," "I saw maize in brilliant hues, much maize," or simply, "I saw my life"). Under
certain conditions the mara'akdme might be called upon to assist in giving form and
meaning to a vision, especially for one who is a matewdme (novice) or in the context of a
cure. This much is clear, however: beyond certain "universal" visual and auditory
sensations, which may be laid to the chemistry of the plant and its effect on the central
nervous system, there are powerful cultural factors at work that here as elsewhere
influence, if they do not actually determine, both content and interpretation of the drug
experience. Huichols told me they were convinced that the mara'akdme, or one preparing
himself to become a mara'akdme, and the ordinary person have different kinds of peyote
experiences. Certainly a mara'akdme embarks on the pilgrimage and the drug experience
itself with a somewhat different set of expectations than the ordinary Huichol. He seeks to
experience a catharsis that allows him to enter upon a personal encounter with Tatewan and
travel to "the fifth level" to meet the supreme spirits at the ends of the world. And so he
does. Ordinary Huichols also "experience" the supernaturals, but they do so essentially
through the medium of their shaman. In any event, I have met no one who was not
convinced of this essential difference or who laid claim to the same kinds of exalted and
illuminating confrontations with the Otherworld as the mara'akdme. In an objective sense
his visions might be similar, but subjectively they are differently perceived and interpreted.
Certainly this applies to the mara'akdme or aspiring mara'akdme who leads the peyoteros
as the personification of Tatewan, the First Mara'akdme, and who is so addressed by his
companions for the duration of the pilgrimage.
However, a rather surprising number of Huichol adult men, and some women too, consider
themselves, and are considered by their fellows, to be shamans, so that the more intense
peyote experience attributed to shamans can be assumed to be relatively widely shared.
The pervasiveness of shamanism among the Huichols was first noted by Lumholtz in the
1890's (Lumholtz, 1900). His estimate of perhaps half the adult males as shamans seemed
to me at first improbably high for an agricultural people like the Huichols, however incipient
and primitive their agricultural economy may be in comparison to that of other peoples with
a longer tradition of farming and a more advanced agricultural technology. But Lumholtz
turned out to be right, at least in the sense that all household heads really are family
shamans, some with considerable prestige that extends far beyond their immediate kinfolk,
and that at least half the men, and some women, possess a good deal of shamanic and
ritual knowledge and presumably have had profound ecstatic trance experiences with
peyote. Some shamans, of course, are considered to have much greater mystical powers
than others, and their counsel carries correspondingly greater weight.

The Children of Peyote

The hikuri seekers left as they had entered—on foot, single file, blowing their horns. Their
once-white clothing was caked with the yellow earth of the desert, for during the night it
had begun to drizzle—an astonishing event at the height of the dry season and an
auspicious omen. Behind them a thin plume of blue smoke rose from the ceremonial fire.
They had circled it as required. They had made their offerings of tobacco and bits of food
and sacred water from the springs of Our Mothers. They had purified their sandals. They
had wept bitter tears as they bade farewell to Tatewari, to Elder Brother, to the Kakauyarixi.
They had found their life. They had confirmed the sacred truths with their own senses, the
inner vision that comes only when one eats the flesh of the divine Deer-Peyote. Now they
were truly Vixdrika (Huichol).

114
A few hundred yards down the trail they halted once more. Facing the mountains and the
sun, they shouted their pleasure at having found their life, and their pain at having to
depart so soon. "Do not leave," they implored the supernaturals, "do not abandon your
places, for we will come again another year." And they sang, song after song—their parting
gift to the Kakauyarixi:
What pretty hills, what pretty hills,
So very green where we are.
Now I don't even feel,
Now I don't even feel,
Now I don't even feel like going to my rancho.
For there at my rancho it is so ugly,
So terribly ugly there at my rancho,
And here in Wirikuta so green, so green.
And eating in comfort as one likes,
Amid the flowers (peyote), so pretty.
Nothing but flowers here,
Pretty flowers, with brilliant colors,
So pretty, so pretty.
And eating one's fill of everything,
Everyone so full here, so full with food.
The hills very pretty for walking,
For shouting and laughing,
So comfortable, as one desires,
And being together with all one's companions.
Do not weep, brothers, do not weep.
For we came to enjoy it,
We came on this trek,
To find our life.
For we are all,
We are all,
We are all the children of,
We are all the sons of
A brilliantly colored flower,
A flaming flower.
And there is no one,
There is no one,
Who regrets what we are.

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12. Datura: A Hallucinogen That Can Kill
There is another hallucinogenic plant in the mythology of the Huichols, anthropomorphized
as Kieri Tewiyari, Kieri Person, whose special powers and relationship to the Sun deity are
acknowledged with offerings of prayer arrows and other gifts. However, if Kieri (pronounced
ki-yeri) is used at all, it is only rarely, in secrecy, and is generally disapproved. For many
Huichols regard Kieri as a dangerous sorcerer whose effects, unlike those of peyote, may
cause permanent insanity and even death.
Kieri, whose story "from ancient times" is recited by shamans especially in the context of
the peyote ceremonies, grows in remote and rocky places in and about the mountainous
Huichol country, with a prominent cluster of sharp rock pinnacles, rising precipitously at the
edge of Cora territory in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental, generally thought to be
his proper home. It is said that Kieri established himself at this formidable redoubt—which,
incidentally, also served as a last bastion of armed Indian resistance against the Spaniards
in 1722—after his defeat by the deer god and culture hero Kauyumarie.
What does this Kieri look like? In his plant form, say the Huichols, Kieri has white, funnel-
shaped flowers and spiny seed pods. With the enchanting music of his violin he lures the
unwary and bids them taste of his leaves, his flowers, his roots, and his seeds. But whoever
obeys his wiles suffers insanity or death: people bewitched by Kieri will believe themselves
to be birds, for example, able to fly from the highest rocks, but unless they are saved by a
shaman with the aid of peyote and Kauyumarie, they will dash themselves to death below.
Or, if they heed Kieri's urgings and eat more and more of him, they will fall into a deep
sleep and never awaken, because only the shaman knows in what manner to deal with such
a sorcerer. Nevertheless, one must respect Kieri for his supernatural power, and when one
encounters him one should deposit the proper offerings, such as prayer arrows, and when
one passes his rocky abode in the distance, one should make appropriate ritual gestures in
his direction. The peyote pilgrims whom we accompanied to Wirikuta in 1968 did in fact hold
a special ceremony when they came within sight of the aforementioned rocky pinnacles in
Nayarit, including the burning of candles (as miniature effigies of the fire deity), and
propitiatory chants and gestures toward Kieri's dwelling place.

117
Conventional wisdom has long held that Kieri is Datura inoxia (meteloides). Robert Zingg
(1938) identified it as such, and the descriptions of the plant collected by Barbara G.
Myerhoff and myself in 1964/1966 accorded with most of its salient characteristics. These
included, in particular, funnel-shaped flowers and the spiny seed pods from which "thorn
apple," one of the popular names for two species, D. inoxia and D. stramonium, is derived
(Furst and Myerhoff, 1966:3-39; 1972:53-106). ("Extract of Thom Apple" is also the name
under which medicinal Datura preparations were bottled and marketed by the Shakers in
the nineteenth century). The identification of Kieri as Datura now appears to have been
correct only for part of the Huichol country. While it accords with the probable ultimate
origins of the ancestral Huichols in the Southwest, where Datura continues to play an
important role, especially among the Zuni, according to Timothy Knab (personal
communication), a field worker in anthropological linguistics, Huichol informants in the
region visited by him attributed the name Kieri to a species of Solandra, a genus closely
related to and resembling to some degree the Daturas and probably chemically similar to
them. While Solandra use in a strictly ceremonial context has not been previously reported,
M. Martinez (1966) identified hueipatii, said to have been a narcotic used in central Mexico
at the time of the Conquest, us Solandra guerrerensis .* The same Mexican scholar, who
also authored a classic modern work on medicinal plants. Las Plantas Medicinales de Mexico
(1959), notes that S. guerrerensis is still employed by some Indians in the state of
Guerrero.
Although they make offerings to the plant, call it the "real Kieri," and express great awe, if
not indeed fear, of it, no Huichols today appear to be using Solandra medicinally or
hallucinogenically. But the mythic descriptions of the powers of Kieri to bewitch and
transform are too specific not to be based on actual experience, presumably at some time in
the past. If Kieri is Datura in one part of the rugged Huichol country and Solandra in
another, or if, as well may be the case, there are two Kieris, in the main potentially
malevolent, one manifesting himself in Datura and the other in Solandra, we are confronted
with the phenomenon of a supernatural being who manifests himself in the same culture in
two related but distinct solanaceous species. But considering that Datura and Solandra
share similar potentially dangerous chemical properties, that would perhaps not be so
strange.

Figure 10 Datura. Two species, as depicted in the sixteenth century Aztec herbal known as the
Codex Badianus.

*
I am indebted to Timothy Knab (personal communication) for drawing my attention to this reference.

118
The early chroniclers reported that the Aztec priests administered to those to be sacrificed
an herbal anodyne, so that they did not feel the pain. Although the Aztec name for the
unidentified plant was not one of those used for Datura, some botanists and
pharmacologists have thought it might nonetheless have been a Datura, whose effects are
known to be analgesic. But there was no certainty, and the real identity of the mysterious
narcotic has remained in question since the sixteenth century. If Solandra turns out to
possess the same analgesic properties as its close relative Datura, the mystery of the
elusive hallucinogenic yauhtii may at last have been solved.

Myth as History
However this turns out, the Huichol tale of Kieri has a decidedly historical flavor. We hear of
him acting like a shaman—curing, singing, playing his drum, conversing with the solar deity
and seeking his aid. Kauyumarie watches and decides that Kieri is really an evil sorcerer
who deceives the people. Only when he has learned all he can of Kieri's "secrets"—i.e.
magic—does Kauyumarie decide to attack him. In the final struggle to overcome his
adversary, he invokes the aid of the peyote cactus, which wards off Kieri's sickness
projectiles, allowing Kauyumarie to shoot five arrows into the enemy's chest. Kieri falls, but
instead of dying is allowed by his protector, the Sun, to transform into a flowering plant. In
this form he flies away to his secret hiding place up in the rocks, where those who respect
his magical powers pay him homage and often find themselves bewitched by his poison,
which is proffered with such entreaties as, "Here, eat this, it is better than peyote."
One is tempted to read this as history couched in mythic terms because there must have
been a time in Huichol prehistory when an ideological shift occurred among some of their
Uto-Aztecan ancestors, away from the Datura cults characteristic of the Southwest to the
more benign peyote, perhaps when they first came upon Lophophora williamsii in the course
of their southward expansion from the original homeland of this important language family
in the Arizona-Sonora desert. Since Datura, which can be fatal, and the more benign peyote
are somewhat dissimilar experiential phenomena, such a change might have had some
disruptive effects on the traditional magico-religious life of the society and its relationship
with the supernatural. Perhaps the Kieri-Kauyumarie tradition recalls an actual rivalry
between the two systems, symbolized by the priest-shamans of the competing sacred
plants, or else the tradition collapses into manageable form a more gradual evolutionary
transition from the one to the other after a period of coexistence, which has continued, at
least in symbolic form, to the present day. Kieri's supernatural power (whether manifested
in Datura or Solandra or both) is, after all, still acknowledged in prayer offerings, meant not
only to ward off evil but also to ensure fertility, rain, and other good things. To some degree
this recalls the final displacement of the "mescal bean" by peyote among the Indians of the
Southern Plains toward the end of the nineteenth century (a process that, considering the
fact that peyote appears in the archaeological record in South Texas alongside the mescal
bean as early as AD 800, may have had its beginning long ago). However, unlike Datura,
the traditional Sophora bean was not consigned to the realm of sorcery but was
incorporated into the new material culture of the peyote religion at least as an ornamental
component.

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Natural and Cultural History of Datura
Unlike peyote and other exclusively New World hallucinogens, the genus Datura is
cosmopolitan and it and other members of the Solanaceae (potato or nightshade family)
have played a role in religion, magic, divination, sorcery, and medicine in different parts of
the world, apparently since ancient times. The family consists of more than 90 genera, with
no less than 2,400 species, including such disparate plants as the potato, eggplant,
nightshade, peppers, tomato, tobacco, petunia, Datura, and many others. Only a few of
these are known to be truly hallucinogenic, although Mesoamerican Indians, among others,
attribute at least narcotic or medicinal properties to several solanaceous genera, among
them Solandra and species of Solanum.
Apart from tobacco, which is in a class by itself, some of the Solanaceae are important only
for nutrition (although even some of these, including the tomato and potato, contain toxic
principles in the leaves or stalks but not in the edible fruit). But others, like the well-known
A tropa belladonna, Hyoscyamus, and the Daturas are valued for psychotropic alkaloids, of
which a number have passed from herbal into modern medicine.
Atropa belladonna, also called deadly nightshade and, in European folk usage, sorcerer's
herb, is the source of several important drugs, of which atropine is the best known. The
genus Atropa, whose principal active alkaloid, scopolamine, occurs in four species in
combination with other alkaloids, is native to the Old World and is found in Europe as well
as Central and southern Asia. Henbane, Hyoscyamus niger, source of the important medical
drug hyoscyamus, is one of about 20 species of the genus, which is native to Europe,
northern Africa, and southwestern and central Asia.
The main tropane alkaloids in the famous mandrake, Mandr agora officianarum, are
hyoscyamine, scopolamine, and mandragorina. Six species of Mandragora are found from
the Mediterranean to the Himalayas (Schultes, 1970; see also Schultes and Hofmann, 1973,
pp. 161-191).
Both hemispheres share the genus Datura, and both have used it. Not surprisingly,
however, in light of the stress on the ecstatic experience by most Native Americans, more
species were utilized in the New World, and the genus achieved a much higher and more
lasting status, being employed in divination, prophecy, ecstatic initiation, ritual intoxication,
diagnosis, and medicine. It is also widely employed to give extra potency to ritual
beverages, both of the hallucinogenic and the fermented variety. So, for example, the
Tarahumara Indians of Chihuahua even now sometimes add Datura inoxia to tesgüino, a
fermented drink made from sprouted maize which the Huichols call nawd, while in South
America the Jivaro of Ecuador, for example, strengthen natema, the hallucinogenic
beverage made basically from a species of Banisteriopsis, by adding a species of Datura of
the arborescent subgenus Brugmansia, and sometimes also guayusa, a stimulating caffeine-
containing tea made from Ilex guayusa, a species of holly.

120
Figure 11 Anadenanthera peregrina

In curing. Datura preparations served to place the doctor in touch with the supernaturals for
the purpose of ascertaining the cause of the illness, but were also used as medicine for the
patient, being applied both externally and internally. Not only the Aztecs but many other
Indians were quite familiar with the analgesic effects of Datura and used it effectively to
alleviate pain. Matilda Coxe Stevenson (1915), for example, reports that among the Zuñi of
New Mexico, who ascribe divine origin to Datura inoxia and whose Rain Priest Fraternity has
a special relationship to the sacred plant, the curer administers the root to
… render his patient unconscious while he performs simple operations—
setting fractured limbs, treating dislocations, making incisions for removing
pus, eradicating diseases of the uterus, and the like. (p. 41)
She also reports witnessing an operation in which the Zuni curer used a flint knife to open
the abscessed breast of a woman who had been placed into a deep sleep with Datura inoxia
(then still called D. meteloides). When she awoke she said she had experienced only
beautiful dreams but no pain whatever.
The principal alkaloids in the fifteen to twenty species that comprise the genus Datura and
its four subgroups are hyoscyamine, norhyoscyamine, and scopolamine, all belonging to the
tropane series. Depending on ecological factors, and possibly on genetic differences, there is
considerable variation in the alkaloidal content even of the same species and their different
parts. So, for example, scopolamine constitutes from 50 to 60 percent of the total base
content of the arborescent Datura Candida growing in the Andes, but only 30 to 40 percent
for the same species cultivated in England or Hawaii (Schultes, 1970:584). Similar
differences have been recorded for other alkaloids. Here again we find the Indians to have
been careful observers. Schultes notes that the alkaloidal content of cultivated D. Candida
plants, for example, has been proved experimentally to correlate closely with accounts of
their relative toxicity by the Indians of Sibundoy, Colombia, who certainly had no access to
a chemical laboratory. The same kind of sophistication is also reflected in the selection of
different parts of the Daturas (as of other hallucinogenic species) in accordance with their
proven potency.

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Effects of Datura Intoxication
The four subgroups of the genus are: (1) Stramonium, with three species in the two
hemispheres; (2) Dutra, with six species; (3) Ceratocaulis, with only one, but very
interesting, semiaquatic Mexican species whose supernatural spirit Indian curers invoke for
the treatment of certain diseases; and (4) Brugmansia, a group of tree Daturas with often
very showy flowers that were formerly exclusive to South America but are now found in
many parts of the world as cultivated ornamentals.
Depending on dosage, the effects of the active alkaloids of Datura—scopolamine, for
example—have been found experimentally to extend from a feeling of lassitude through
hallucination to deep, dreamless sleep and loss of consciousness, with death possible in the
absence of effective countermeasures. The early accounts are correct: Datura can kill, and it
can apparently also be administered by an experienced person in such amounts and in such
ways as to bring about temporary derangement and even permanent insanity, which is
precisely why the genus has entered the practice of witchcraft.
In these respects the Daturas of course differ considerably from other hallucinogens, whose
most drastic effects might be a "bad trip" but which are not known to be capable of
physiological damage. The Daturas and the cytisine-containing "mescal bean" are thus in a
very different class from other sacred plants in the psychedelic pharmacopoeia of American
Indians. In this connection I recall a story I heard from a competent, well-educated, and
trustworthy informant in Cuernavaca, Mexico, who had occasion to observe the disastrous
effects of repeated, deliberate applications of Datura to an individual said to have been
responsible for the betrayal and death of a popular peasant leader in the state of Morelos
some years ago.
A quick death having been judged too benign a punishment by his captors, the wretched
man was turned over to a local bruja—a word meaning "witch," but applied also to folk
healers or curanderas. In my experience most Mexican folk healers are not only
accomplished herbalists but generally effective psychologists, who might have much to
teach their university-educated colleagues if these were only willing to listen. In any event,
it seems that by a judicious combination of repeated infusions of toloache (D. inoxia) and a
play on his guilt feelings, together with hypnotic suggestion, she brought the man to a state
where for several months, until his death, he walked, barked, fed, and was treated like a
dog—a fate some of the local people seemed to think he deserved only too well. Not only
the proven veracity of my informant but the results of laboratory experiments with the
chemicals in Datura lend weight to this tale of elementary justice derived from ancient
knowledge of the properties of plants.

Datura among North American Indians

None of the above should be taken to mean that the negative potential of Datura in any
sense, or anywhere, outweighed its positive role in the indigenous ritual and symbolic
systems. On the contrary, most Indians in North and South America have used these plants
solely for positive purposes, such as initiation of boys and their integration into adulthood
and full participation in tribal culture through ecstatic confrontation of the truth of the
ancestral ways; for individual and communal vision seeking and communication with
ancestors, deities, and spirits of land, air, and water; and for divination, prophecy, curing,
and the alleviation of physical and mental distress.

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Apart from "thorn apple," a popular name for Datura in the United States has long been
"Jamestown Weed," commonly shortened to "Jimsonweed." Properly, this refers only to the
eastern species. Datura stramonium; the name itself stems from an incident involving some
English soldiers on their way to quell a rebellion led by a Lieutenant Bacon, at Jamestown,
Virginia, in the seventeenth century. Robert Beverly (ca. 1673-ca. 1722), in his History and
Present State of Virginia (1705), describes what happened:
The James Town Weed (which resembles the Thorny Apple of Peru, and I take
to be the plant so call'd) is supposed to be one the greatest Coolers in our
World. This being an early Plant, was gather'd very young for a boil'd Salad,
by some of the Soldiers sent thither, to pacify the Troubles of Bacon; and
some of them eat plentifully of it, the Effect of which was a very pleasant
Comedy; for they turn'd natural Fools upon it for several Days; One would
blow up a Feather in the air; another would dart Straws at it with much Fury;
and another stark naked was sitting up in a Comer, like a Monkey, grinning
and making Mows at them; a Fourth would fondly kiss, and paw his
Companions, and sneer in their Faces, with a Countenance more antick, than
any in a Dutch Droll. In this frantick Condition they were confined, lest they
should in their Folly destroy themselves; though it was observed, that all their
Actions were full of Innocence and good Nature. Indeed, they were not very
cleanly; for they would have wallow'd in their own Excrements, if they had
not been prevented. A Thousand such simple Tricks they play'd, and after
Eleven Days, return'd to themselves again, not remembering any thing that
had pass'd. (Quoted in Schleiffer, 1973:129-130)
The soldiers claimed they had picked Datura stramonium because they thought it might be
a savory pot herb, but chances are that they had really learned of the intoxicating effects
from the original inhabitants of Virginia, who used Datura in boys' initiation rites that
resembled the toloache ceremonies of California Indians. The characteristic death-rebirth
theme of rites of passage clearly emerges from Beverly's rather quaint but perceptive
description of what he calls "the Solemnity of Huskanawing." When the time for initiation
had been set by the elders, the young men and boys were taken into the forest, where they
were kept in strict seclusion in a specially constructed hut of latticework. After long fasting
and instruction, they were given repeated decoctions of Datura root, called wysoccan, which
brought on a state of apparently violent intoxication that lasted from 18 to 20 days. During
this crucial period the boys were supposed to shed themselves of all memory of their youth.
When the shamans felt that the boys had drunk enough, the dosages were gradually
reduced, and the initiates, carefully guarded, allowed to return to their homes. As they
came out of their intoxication they had to watch themselves, and were watched by the
shamans, lest there be any remembrance of their former state of childhood. If that
happened they had to be "huskanawed" again, and since in that event even greater
quantities of wysoccan were required, the second initiatory ordeal sometimes ended in
death:
Thus they must pretend to have forgot the very use of their Tongues, so as
not to be able to speak, nor understand any thing that is spoken, till they
learn it again. Now whether this be real or counterfeit, I don't know; but
certain it is, that they will not for some time take notice of any body, nor any
thing, with which they were before acquainted, being still under the guard of
their Keepers, who constantly wait upon them every where, till they have
learnt all things perfectly over again. Thus they unlive their former lives, and
commence Men, by forgetting that they ever have been Boys… .
Further, the rite of passage and the violent Datura intoxication was to undo whatever bonds
or prejudices the initiates had formed toward "persons and things" during their childhood:

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 They hope by this proceeding, to root out all the prepossessions and
unreasonable prejudices which are fixt in the minds of Children. So that,
when the Young men come to themselves again, their Reason may act freely,
without being bypass'd by the Cheats of Custom and Education. Thus also
they become discharg'd from the remembrance of any tyes by Blood, and are
establish't in a state of equality and perfect freedom, to order their actions,
and dispose of their persons, as they think fit, without any other Controul,
than that of the Law of Nature. By this means also they become qualify'd
when they have any Publick Office, equally and impartially to administer
Justice, without having respect either to Friend or Relation. (Quoted in
Schleiffer, 1973: pp. 130-132)

Initiation Rites in California

An Indian so initiated would not likely have suffered an "identity crisis." Would that we and
our parents had been so fortunate in knowing when the psychological boundary between
childhood and adulthood had been crossed!
In California, the toloache initiation cult originated among the Shoshonean (Uto-Aztecan)
peoples of the south, but some of its features spread as far north as the San Joaquin and
Sacramento Valleys. The puberty-rite aspect with its prominent death-rebirth theme was
especially well developed among such Southern Californians as the Diegeno and Luiseno, for
whom the Datura cult stood at the very heart of the entire religious system (Kroeber,
1953). In the main, only boys were initiated with toloache, girls having their own puberty
rituals, but among some tribes, especially in the north, girls could also take Datura.
Among the Luiseno, among whom the cult was especially well developed, the boys' puberty
ceremony was not conducted annually, or even at a fixed season, but performed every few
years—whenever a sufficient number of youths were judged to be ready for initiation. Also,
any man, or even a visitor from some other group, who had never taken toloache (Datura
was drunk only once in a lifetime), was given the drug along with the youngsters, to whom
the drink was administered at night, in a specially consecrated secluded place, following a
period of food restrictions and instruction. The dried roots of Datura inoxia were pounded in
freshly painted mortars that were used for no other purpose and were kept in sacred hiding
places. The powdered root, mixed with hot water, was drunk from the mortar itself, each
boy in turn kneeling before it, with the ceremonial manager holding his head, to pull it back
when it was thought he had had enough. Following the drinking the boys were taken charge
of by men who assisted them in the processions and dances that followed, including
ceremonial circuits around the fire.
Before long the drug took effect and the boys fell unconscious. They were then carried into
a small enclosure where they lay stupefied, watched by some of the men. The duration of
complete narcosis varied from group to group. The Diegeno gave warm water to the boys
after one night to help them recover. Among the Luiseno the intoxication seems to have
lasted longer, up to three nights, but there must have been considerable individual
variation, since not all the initiates were of the same age and size, and there was no definite
measure of the amount of root used. In any event, the effect of the drug was powerful and
the Luiseno reported some fatal cases. Whatever the initiates experienced in the course of
the trance,

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 … becomes of lifelong intimate sanctity to them. This vision is usually an
animal, and at least at times they learn from it a song which they keep as
their own. It seems also that they will not kill any individual of the species. It
is clear that the concept of the vision corresponds exactly with what among
certain primitive tribes has been unfortunately denominated the "personal
totem." It is certain that a special and individual relation of a supernatural
kind is believed to exist forever after between the dreamer and the dream.
The similarity to shamanism is also obvious; but it would be misleading to
name the Luiseno institution outright "shamanistic" or "totemic." (Kroeber,
1953:669-670)
Nonetheless, the final ritual, which takes place about two months after the toloache
drinking, is unmistakable in its similarity to shamanistic mythology the world over. The
central figure in this ceremony is called wanawut, a man-sized animal-like effigy with a
body, head, arms, legs, and sometimes a tail, made of mesh or netting of milkweed or
nettle twine, that is laid in a trench, with three or four flat stones set upon it:
Each boy in turn now enters the trench, supported by the old man who has
acted as his sponsor, and at a signal leaps from stone to stone. Should he
slip, it is an indication that he will die soon. Very small boys are partially
assisted by the old men. When all have jumped, they help the old men push
the earth into the trench, burying the figure. The symbolism of this strange
rite clearly refers to life and death. The trench represents the grave: the
Luiseno cremated their corpses over a pit which was filled when the embers
and bones had sunk in. The figure is human. It is specifically said to denote
the Milky Way—otherwise a symbol of the spirit or soul. There seems also to
be present the idea that the spirit of the dead is to be tied, perhaps to the
sky, at any rate away from the earth; and the cordage of the object is
probably significant in this regard. (Kroeber, 1953:671-672)
After the burial of the wanawut, there was dancing through the night, ending with a fire
dance and the destruction by fire of the brush enclosure in which the toloache drinking took
place. The boys had now forever left their childhood days behind. The Datura had done its
sacred work and they would never taste it again.

Transcending "Ordinary Reality"

The ritual use of Datura inoxia in boys' puberty rites of the southern California Cahuilla has
been described by several anthropologists (e.g. Kroeber, 1908; Hooper, 1920; Strong,
1929, and, most recently, Bean, 1972); the most complete account is that of William
Duncan Strong (1929: 173-175), who noted that the Cahuilla regarded Datura as a great
shaman with whom they could communicate in the course of their ceremonies. There were
special manet songs connected with the Datura rituals which only the shamans could
understand, because they were not in the everyday Cahuilla tongue but in a special esoteric
"ocean language" addressed to the shamans and supernatural beings that lived on the floor
of the sea.

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An extensive discussion of what has survived of the multiple meanings and uses of Datura
among the modern Cahuilla, whose language belongs to the Shoshonean branch of Uto-
Aztecan and who are historically related not only to their Shoshonean-speaking neighbors
but also to the Hopi of Arizona, and, more distantly, to the Huichols, the Cora, and other
speakers of Uto-Aztecan tongues in Mesoamerica, can be found in a recent work on Cahuilla
ethno-botany by anthropologist Lowell J. Bean and Mrs. Katherine Siva Saubel, a member of
the tribal council of Los Coyote Cahuilla Reservation and herself a noted authority on the
traditions and culture of her people (Bean and Saubel, 1972). Apart from its crucial role in
boys' initiation rites, which resemble those of the Luiseno, Gabrieleno and other desert and
coastal tribes of southern California, the authors note (pp. 61-62) that Datura afforded the
puul (shaman) a means of transcending ordinary reality and coming into contact with
specific guardian spirits, as well as enabling him to go on magical flights to Otherworlds or
transform himself into certain animals, such as the mountain lion or eagle. Such flights and
transformations in the Datura trance were a necessary and routine activity of shamans, for
such purposes as bringing back information about the Upper- and Underworld, visiting the
dead, or retrieving lost or strayed souls.
Datura also played an important role in native medicine. As among the Zuni and Aztecs, the
plant was employed by Cahuilla shamans in the form of a paste or ointment as a highly
effective pain killer in setting broken or dislocated bones, alleviating localized pain, and
even relieving toothache. Depending on the effect desired, the Indians commonly used the
root in a drink, generally smoked the leaves, and crushed both roots and leaves with other
parts of the plant and mixed them into a medicinal paste.
At the same time, the authors stress that the Cahuilla are well aware of the very real
dangers in using a plant that may cause serious mental disorientation, disorders in
locomotor activities, acute cardiac symptoms endangering heart functions, and other severe
physiological problems ranging from temporary psychosis to death. Despite their superior
knowledge, even some shamans refrained from Datura use, preferring other techniques to
achieve contact with the supernatural. All the Cahuilla who discussed Datura with them.
Bean and Saubel write (p. 60),
… stressed that the plant is unpredictable and warned against its use by the
casual experimenter.
No idle warning: in the past few years, the authors note, several young people in southern
California have died after experimenting with Datura, and many others have required
hospitalization.

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13. Hallucinogenic Snuffs And Animal Symbolism
Thus far we have encountered deer, jaguars, birds, snakes and toads in relation to the
sacred hallucinogens, either in some symbolic association, or in the imagery of the ecstatic
trance, or even as avatar of a particular plant. Animal symbolism is clearly inseparable from
the traditional psychedelic complexes of the Old and New Worlds, and its investigation of
great culture-historical and psychological interest. These final chapters will concern
themselves with some of these questions, and they will lead us in some surprising
directions.
But I want to back into that fascinating arena by returning once more to the potent snuffs
that greeted the early Spanish explorers as the first manifestation of the New World
hallucinogens. For it is above all in the technology and symbolism of snuffing that a whole
complex of animal imagery manifests itself in archaeological and ethnographic art.
In considering the major hallucinogenic snuffs, we should not forget that many of the scores
of psychoactive plants of the New World could at least theoretically be used in this way, and
that especially in South America there is much evidence for such experimentation. Even Ilex
guayusa, the caffeine-containing holly that, along with its sister species, is widely utilized as
a stimulating tea (e.g., mate = I. paraguayensis), served as snuff, at least for some
shamans of ancient highland Bolivia, judging from a recently excavated shaman's grave
dated to ca. AD 500, that contained bundles of Ilex leaves together with a complete kit for
preparing and taking snuff. The kit also includes clysters, so that the same plant might even
have been employed as enemas (Schultes, 1972b).

Figure 12 Amanita muscaria

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The principal snuffs are now well known, their botany and chemistry having at last emerged
from a long period of taxonomical confusion and uncertainty. At first, as was mentioned
earlier, tobacco was thought to be the source of the hallucinogenic snuff of the West Indies.
Then, for a long time—in fact, until just a few years ago—all intoxicating snuffs, from the
Antilles through much of South America, were almost uniformly ascribed to one species of
Piptadenia, P. peregrina, closely related to the acacias and mimosas. Now, thanks to plant
taxonomist Siri von Reis Altschul (1964, 1972), a student of Schultes, P. peregrina has been
removed from that genus and reclassified as one of two species belonging to a new, related,
but clearly distinct hallucinogenic genus, Anadenanthera. The other is A. colubrina, a
western South American species that is the source of the sacred huiica (wilka) seeds of the
Andes, which were variously employed in the form of snuff, infusions, and even enemas.

The Virola Tree as a Source of Snuff

But even this corrected classification did not clear up all the confusion, because snuffs were
attributed by many writers to Anadenanthera, whether or not that genus actually occurred
locally, and even though the observed method of preparation suggested that several
different and even unrelated species might be involved. The mystery was cleared up when
several species of Virola, a tree belonging not, like Anadenanthera, to the Leguminoseae
(pea family) but, like nutmeg, to the Myristicaceae, were confirmed as source of some of
the snuffs once attributed solely to A. peregrina. Schultes was again prominently involved in
settling this problem.

Figure 13 Virola theidora

The principal hallucinogenic alkaloids in both Anadenanthera (peregrina and colubrina) and
in the several species of Virola (V. theidora, V. callophylla, V. callophylloidea) are
tryptamines, as they are also in one species of Banisteriopsis, and in the sacred mushrooms
and other ritual hallucinogens of Mexico. In A. peregrina and colubrina, bufotenine (5-
hydroxy-N, N-dimethyltryptamine) is present in large amounts, and for a time the central
nervous activity of Anadenanthera snuffs was thought to be due mainly to this alkaloid,
which these leguminous trees share with the toad (Bufo spp.). Recent analyses have shown,
however, that other tryptamine derivatives are also present in the seeds—such as N, N-
dimethyltryptamine, N-monomethyl-tryptamine,5-methoxy-N, 5-methoxy-N-
monomethyltryptamine,N, N-dimethyltryptamine-N-oxide,5-hydroxy-N, and N-
dimethyltryptamine-N-oxide (Schultes, 1972a:28).

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Figure 14 V. callophylla

Snuff prepared from Virola theidora alone, without admixtures, contains 5-methoxy-N,N-
dimethyltryptamine in concentrations of up to 8 percent, along with smaller amounts of
N,N-dimethyltryptamine and related alkaloids. Alkaloid concentrations vary in different parts
of the tree, but the bark generally contains the highest percentage.
Now, as we know, tryptamines require a monoamine oxidase inhibitor to become effective
in man, a problem the Indians have solved in several known instances by mixing different
hallucinogenic species together. For example, Banisteriopsis rushy ana is a chemical oddity
among its sister species, in that in contrast to B. caapi and B. inebrians, whose active
principles are beta-carboline harmala alkaloids, its active constituents are tryptamines! This
explains why the Tukanoan Indians of Colombian Amazonia, for example, never take B.
rusbyana by itself but mix it with B. caapi or B. inebrians into an especially potent form of
yajé, a method that allows the beta-carboline harmala alkaloids of the one to function as
inhibitors for the tryptamines of the other. Thus not only the harmala alkaloids but also the
tryptamines are able to play their part in the ecstatic intoxication. As Schultes (1972a)
observes, here again one cannot help but wonder
how peoples in primitive societies, with no knowledge of chemistry or
physiology, ever hit upon a solution to the activation of an alkaloid by a
monoamine oxidase inhibitor, (p. 38)

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Figure 15 V. callophylloidea

Now, in the case of Virola snuffs, no such activating admixture seems to be absolutely
required, since two new carbolines have recently been discovered in V. theidora itself
(Schultes, 1970). Nevertheless, admixtures that can themselves be psychodynamically
effective are frequently employed. Schultes (1972a), who visited the Waika (Yanomamo) in
1967 with the Swedish pharmacologist Bo Holmstedt, describes their technique as follows:
There are a number of methods of preparing the snuff, which is called epena
or nyakwma by the many "tribes" which I include under the generic term
Waika. Some scrape the soft inner layer of the bark of the tree, dry the
shavings by gentle roasting over a fire, and store them until they are needed
for making the snuff. They are then crushed and pulverized, triturated and
sifted. The resultant powder is fine, homogeneous, chocolate-brown, and
highly pungent. Then, when the Indians desire it (but not always) a dust of
the powdered dry leaves of the aromatic acanthaceous weed Justicia
pectoralis var. stenophylla is added in equal amounts. The third, and
invariable, ingredient is the ash of the bark of a rare leguminous tree,
Elizabetha princeps. This tree is known as ama or amasita by the Waika.
These ashes are mixed in approximately equal amounts with the resin, or
resin and Justicia powder, to give a brownish-grey snuff.
Other Waikas follow a different procedure, at least when they are preparing
the snuff for ceremonial purposes. The bark is stripped from the Virola tree,
the strips laid over a gentle fire in the forest, and the copious blood-red resin
is scraped into an earthenware pot. It is boiled down and allowed to sun-dry.
Then, alone or mixed with the powdered Justicia leaves, it is sifted and is
ready for use. (p. 43)

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Figure 16 Psychotria viridis

J. pectoralis appears to be itself a potent hallucinogen, containing, like Virola, tryptamine

alkaloids. It is in fact cultivated by some of the Yanomamo groups studied by anthropologist
Napoleon Chagnon and his colleagues on the Upper Orinoco and employed without any
active admixtures in one variety of intoxicating ebene snuff (Chagnon et al., 1971). (It
should be noted here that Justicia and another tryptamine-containing South American
genus, Psychotria, occur also in Mexico, a circumstance to which I will return in connection
with the recent discovery of a very ancient snuffing complex in Mexico that was apparently
already long extinct at the time of the Conquest.)

Rapid Intoxication
Intoxication with snuffs prepared basically from the bark resin of Virola theidora or related
species, or the seeds of Anadenanthera peregrina, is extremely rapid and powerful. Not only
in the pre-European past but even today the snuffing technology of agricultural Indians is
quite complex, and all sorts of decorated and undecorated nose pipes, snuffing tubes,
mortars, containers and tablets abound in archaeological and ethnographic collections.
Waika snuffing is much simpler, as is their material culture in general. The Waika, who are
even today essentially hunter-gatherers with incipient tree-and root-crop cultivation, take
the prepared snuff through very long bamboo tubes, one man blowing the charge into
another's nostrils. Almost at once the mucous membranes are activated, the nose begins to
run, and saliva flows copiously. There is also strong itching or tingling of the top of the skull,
to which the Indians react by vigorous scratching. Schultes (1972a) himself experienced no
extraordinary visual or auditory sensations, but for the Indians these occur within minutes
of the ebene charge and are perceived as direct communication with the spirits of animals,
plants, deceased relatives and other supernaturals. There is considerable variation between
individuals in the degree of motor control, with experienced shamans apparently able to
exercise much greater control over their movements than others. The intensity of the
ecstatic trance also varies; the experience is usually of short duration, however, and in the
course of ritual (and, nowadays, among more acculturated Waika, also recreational)
intoxication repeated charges of snuff are customarily inhaled by the participants.

Addiction: Snuff, No; Tobacco, Yes

In light of the frequency with which these powerful tryptamine preparations are employed
and the intensity of the experience, it is worth quoting the following observation:

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 … none of the hallucinogens used by the Yanomamo are habit-forming,
missionary opinions notwithstanding … Yanomamo can and do abstain from
them for weeks and do not mention it or complain about it. Tobacco-chewing,
on the other hand, is habitual: they cannot go several hours without it, and
the entire village is in a state of crisis when the tobacco crop fails. In this
connection the Yanomamo have discovered a number of tobacco substitutes,
from both domestic and feral plant sources, to rely on when they run short of
tobacco. When questioned on the possible substitutes for their hallucinogens,
one informant summarized the drug-tobacco situation as follows:
"When we are out of tobacco we crave it intensely and we say we are hori—in
utter poverty. We do not crave ebene in the same way and therefore never
say that we are "in poverty" when there is none. But yakoana (Virola) is
everywhere, and we can always find some if we want to take ebene."
(Chagnon et al., 1971:74)

Snuffing and Animal Art

No one has contributed more to our knowledge of the symbolic content of Central and South
American snuffing paraphernalia than the Swedish ethnologist S. Henry Wassen, recently
retired director of the Gothenburg Ethno-graphical Museum. Wassen, to whose early studies
of the ethnopharmacology and symbolism of South American frogs and toads we will shortly
return in connection with what has recently been discovered about toad- and frog-poison
intoxication, has over the past decade published several major studies on the use of Indian
snuffs and the iconography of ornamented snuffing paraphernalia (Wassen, 1963-1967).
What has emerged from these studies is an unmistakable symbol complex that ties
shamanism and the ecstatic experience to the already familiar bird-feline-reptilian
configuration we find so prominently in Mesoamerican and Andean cosmology and
iconography. The way this expresses itself in the paraphernalia of snuffing is in
combinations or juxtapositions of elements representing the most important supernatural
animals to which the South American shaman relates—the harpy eagle or king vulture (the
condor in the Andes), the anaconda or boa constrictor, and above all, the jaguar, in styles
that range from near-naturalism to geometric abstraction. Sometimes only one of these is
clearly shown, or else a human being, representing the shaman himself, is depicted in
juxtaposition with one or more of his principal zoomorphic allies or alter egos.
On occasion the complementary opposition of the bird and jaguar, or bird-jaguar-serpent, is
symbolized not in the form of a two- or three-dimensional image but rather in the materials
employed in the making or ornamentation of the implements—e.g. bird-bone snuffing tube
juxtaposed with wooden snuff trays decorated with feline and snake motifs or else bird
feathers and snake skin used as symbolic adornments (see Wassen, 1967, for numerous
illustrations of these motifs).
The juxtaposition of bird and mammal in the material culture of snuffing has a respectable
pedigree, since it is already evident in the oldest snuff paraphernalia thus far known—a
bone tray and tubes which Junius B. Bird of the American Museum of Natural History
excavated in the ancient Peruvian coastal site of Huaca Prieta, and which are dated to about
1600 BC
The point is that analogous arrangements of certain animals and human beings in the
symbolic art of the snuffing complex are not limited to one region or one period but extend
through space and time from the Caribbean to the Andes and from prehistory to the
present.

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Of special interest are decorated snuff containers, mortars, tubes, nose pipes, and related
implements that depict the jaguar as guardian or alter ego of the shaman—a dominant
theme, we recall, in tropical American shamanism that can be recognized in archaeological
snuffing paraphernalia from Argentina and Chile as well as Mesoamerica (Wassen, 1967;
Figures 8, 11, 13-14, 30-31). Not surprisingly we also find it symbolized in other artifacts
connected with the practice of shamanism.

Figure 17 Bird shaped snuffing pipes. Fired clay objects from archaeological sites in Costa Rica. A.
Guanacaste; B D, Linea Vieja. Average length, 5 6 inches. Collection of the Gothenburg
Ethnographic Museum. Drawing courtesy of S. Henry Wassen.

Quite apart from the frequent resort to bird bone for snuffing tubes (a choice that must
have been motivated at least as much by symbolic as by practical considerations), the avian
motif predominates also in the representational or abstract art of the snuffing complex.
Where the bird motif is specific, it usually represents the harpy eagle or its Andean cousin,
the condor, or else some other bird selected for special characteristics that relate it
symbolically to the phenomenology of shamanism. Typically these birds include waterfowl or
diving birds, presumably because their unique ability to transcend the boundaries of
different planes of existence is seen to be analogous to that of the shaman. As a matter of
fact, it is axiomatic of shamanic symbology that it selects precisely those animals that can
shift between different environments or that by virtue of unusual life histories or habits are
perceived as mediators between disparate states. Where the bird motif is unspecific, it
seems to stand for the power of flight that is the shaman's special gift and that is activated
by the hallucinogen. It should also be noted that birds are often regarded as guardian spirits
or even manifestations of specific psychoactive plants, especially tobacco; this observation
provides one clue for the meaning of bird-shaped tobacco pipes in North American Indian
art. Among the many known archaeological examples of the bird motif in snuff
paraphernalia are numerous nose pipes of fired clay from archaeological sites in Costa Rica
and a series of small bird-shaped polished stone mortars from ancient shell middens on the
coast of Brazil. (See Wassen, 1967: Figures 4 and 12. Figure 34 in the same publication
depicts some interesting wooden or bamboo snuffing tubes from several South American
localities with nose pieces shaped like bird's heads, which make them resemble the well-
known bird-headed staffs associated with shamanism as symbols of the shaman's tree and
his ascent to the Upperworld. Such a staff was also found in the shaman's burial in highland
Bolivia. (Schultes, 1972b)

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Snuffing in Mexico
Now we give attention to Mexico and the archaeological evidence for an ancient snuffing
complex that dates back at least to the second millennium BC, apparently became extinct as
a major technique of ritual intoxication before AD 1000, and today survives only in remote
mountain areas of Oaxaca and Guerrero, where some curers are said to inhale the
pulverized seeds of the morning glory (T. Knab, personal communication, based on the
unpublished field notes of the late botanist Thomas McDougall). It has always seemed
puzzling that the early Spanish missionaries, who were certainly alert to the many
manifestations of ritual intoxication, seem not to have seen any evidence of snuffing, even
in areas adjacent to the well-developed snuffing complex of the Caribbean island cultures.
Powdered tobacco is mentioned, but there is nothing to suggest that it, or any other
hallucinogen, was inhaled as snuff.

Photo 8 Deer, holding peyote cactus in its mouth. A snuffing pipe about 2,500 years old, from
Monte Alban, Mexico. Length 5 inches; private collection.

The negative evidence from the sixteenth century notwithstanding, Mexico once did have a
well-developed snuffing complex (Furst, 1974b). Individuals holding nose pipes to their
nostrils are depicted in trance-like states in Colima mortuary art from western Mexico, dated
ca. 100 BC-AD 200. Also, there are in the archaeological art of Oaxaca numerous small
ceramic effigy bowls with short, perforated stems, dating from 500 BC to the first centuries
AD Their purpose becomes obvious once one knows that snuffing was practiced: they are
not "sacrificial" or "libation" bowls, as they are often described, but nose pipes, decorated
with such typically shamanistic themes as flight and transformation.
The earliest Mesoamerican ceramic nose pipes, dating to about 1300-1500 BC, were found
at Xochipala, Guerrero, in association with finely made figurines of men and women in a
remarkably sophisticated and naturalistic style. Among the Xochipala snuffers from this
early site, one simple bowl with a hollow stem is virtually indistinguishable from many that
have been found in Costa Rica. So also is a double-stemmed bird-effigy nose pipe from a
deep shaft-and-chamber tomb in Nayarit, dated ca. AD 100.
Finally, there are the famous Olmec jade artifacts, nicknamed "spoons," that could have
served as snuff tablets. Some of these finely carved and highly polished objects, sometimes
decorated with incised bird-jaguar motifs in the typical Olmec style of 1200-900 BC,
resemble, with their long tails and slightly rounded bodies, stylized profile birds in flight—
symbolism that would fit comfortably into the animal art of hallucinogens, and especially the
flight motif in the iconography of shamanic snuffing (Furst, 1968:162-63).*

*
A graduate student specializing in Olmec iconography, Anatole Pohorilenko, has suggested to me that these
"spoons" may represent not conventionalized birds in flight but tadpoles. He could be right. As a transitional stage
in an ongoing process of metamorphosis, and considering the importance of the frog/toad motif in Mesoamerican
symbolism (see the next chapter), tadpoles would of course accord very well with the iconography of shamanism
and hallucinogens.

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The cumulative evidence points to a southern origin—perhaps northwestern South
America—for the early Mesoamerican snuffing complex. Why it should have disappeared
from Mexico centuries before the Conquest while proliferating so spectacularly in South
America and the West Indies is a mystery. Nor do we know the botany or chemistry of the
Mexican snuffs. They could have been traded from South America (huiica, perhaps?), but as
has been noted, various local hallucinogens could also have been utilized, including acacia-
like trees native to Mexico that have not yet been tested for hallucinogenic alkaloids. Apart
from these possibilities, Mexico shares with South America not only tobacco, which was and
is used as snuff in South America, but also at least one tryptamine-containing genus,
Justicia, from which Indians on the Upper Orinoco make an intoxicating snuff. Clearly, much
ethnobotanical and phytochemical work remains to be done.

Photo 9 Snuffing pipe in use. Ceramic tomb figurine of an "entranced" man with a snuffing pipe
shows hallucinogenic snuff to have been used in Mexico 2,000 years ago. From a shaft and
chamber tomb in Colima, western Mexico, ca. 100 BC AD 200. Height 10 inches.

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14. Toad As Earth Mother: A Problem In Symbolism And
Psychopharmacology
There is in North and South America a widespread mythic complex that links the toad to the
earth as animal manifestation of a dualistic Earth Mother Goddess, at once destroyer and
giver of life. Sometimes the toad is the earth, and from her body sprouted the first food
plants—maize in Mexico, bitter manioc in Amazonia. She is also benefactress of the first
people or culture heroes, teacher of the skills of hunting and the magic arts, and her
dismemberment accounts for the origins of agriculture.
The most dramatic variation on this common theme is Tlaltecuhtii, "Owner (Guardian) of the
Earth," the Mother Goddess in her monstrous, devouring form in the complex cosmological
scheme of the Aztecs of central Mexico, in whose art she is depicted sometimes as a real
toad, more commonly as a clawed, anthropomorphic being in the characteristic upright
squatting position in which women in the traditional world customarily give birth. Her joints
are adorned with human skulls, her fanged mouth is the maw of the Netherworld through
which the human dead and dying Sun pass into her transforming womb in a never-ending
cycle of destruction and rebirth.
In a somewhat fragmentary origin myth set down in Spanish in the sixteenth century, after
the destruction of the world by water, the gods Quetzalcoati and Tezcatlipoca (the one the
bird-serpent, the other the magician who transforms into the jaguar) see Tlaltecuhtii
floating alone in the primordial seas as sole survivor of the universal deluge. Transforming
themselves into snakes, they take hold of the amphibian goddess and split her in half, one
part becoming the heavens, the other the earth—the valleys, mountains, lakes, rivers and
other natural features being formed from different parts of her violated body. The wounded
creature cries pitifully in the night, until the gods decree that she is to bring forth the useful
plants to feed humanity, but that man in turn must guarantee her continued vitality by
pledging his flesh and blood as her proper sustenance.

Toad as Mediator and Dualistic Mother

Tlaltecuhtli is of course not just toad. Rather, with her cavernous mouth and her delivery-
like crouch, the toad is an archetypal form on which the characteristics of other life forms
pertaining to different planes of existence (predators like the jaguar, for example) are often
superimposed. She is thus an ideal image of the mediator, by which otherwise apparently
disparate states are united—life and death, air and water, death and rebirth, and the like.
The fact that the toad is at once impressively fertile and also cannibalistic, often feeding on
smaller members of the same or related species, including her own offspring, almost
certainly reinforced her role as metaphor for the earth as the Great Mother who is at once
giver and taker of life, if it did not in fact inspire it in the first place.
In any event, there is clearly much more than only the "obvious" connection with rain to
account for the importance of the toad-frog motif in the indigenous symbolic system,
including its expression in the visual arts, where it appears both realistically and overlaid
with mythic motifs. More than almost any other member of the animal kingdom, except
perhaps butterflies, toads display a dramatic metamorphosis—from aquatic, gill-breathing,
fish-like vegetarians into largely terrestrial, carnivorous quadrupeds, some of them
equipped with powerful poisons capable of killing (i.e. transforming into another state of
existence), with habitats ranging from the banks of streams and ponds to the crowns of the
highest trees. Thus these creatures seem to embody some of the most fundamental
principles of American Indian thought: transformation, rather than creation ex nihilo, to
account for all phenomena in the natural and supernatural environment; dualism or
complementary opposites; the cycle of death and regeneration.

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Thus the gaping mouth of Tlaltecuhtli—the earth as the terrible devouring mother in her
monstrous feline-toad form—becomes the proper symbol for the maw of the divine earth in
the pictorial codices of ancient Mexico, swallowing the dead as she swallows the dying Sun—
her own offspring—in a constant repetition of destruction and rebirth that will end only if
humanity fails in its duty to feed her with its own flesh and blood. Actually Tlaltecuhtli is
nothing else than the adaptation to complex Middle American civilization of an apparently
very ancient concept—one we find to be fundamental even today in the origin myths of
many peoples of the Amazon basin: the toad as dualistic, beneficent-devouring,
transforming female shaman, owner of the earth and of fire, and originator of the magic
arts as well as the useful arts of agriculture, of which she makes a gift to humanity through
the agency of a culture hero, or more commonly, a pair of Hero Twins. These Twins are
analogous to the Hero Twins of the Maya and other Middle and North American Indians.

Toad Mother and Culture Heroes

The following is a composite summary of the typical Toad Mother-Hero Twin myth whose
distribution, in its essentials, extends from the Guianas in the east to the forested eastern
slopes of the Andes in the west:
The twins are the offspring of a natural mother who is killed and eaten by the Jaguar People
(paralleling the destruction of the first world era and its inhabitants by jaguars in Middle
American cosmology). Toad Woman, or Toad Grandmother, who is also the supernatural
Mother of the Jaguars, intervenes and rescues the pregnant uterus.* She keeps it near her
life-giving maternal hearth until the embryonic twins grow to proper size and emerge. As
befits culture heroes, they reach adulthood with miraculous speed, and are taught the skills
of hunters and the arts of shamanism by their foster mother who, although agriculture has
not yet been invented, feeds them baked cassava bread made from the flour of bitter
manioc, the staple of root-crop agriculture in the tropical forest. Mystified, the Hero Twins,
who have vowed to avenge their real mother's death, spy on their foster mother and
discover that not only are the jaguars who killed their mother her children but she herself
transforms into jaguar and squeezes cassava flour from her poison glands. They kill,
dismember, and burn her in a part of the forest they have cleared for planting. From her
ashes grow the first food plants, her milky poison transforming itself into the bitter, or
poisonous, variety of manioc (Manihot utilisima).

*
It is interesting that in central Europe, in particular, the toad is identified with the womb or uterus, and toad
effigies of metal and other materials are placed in churches as votive offerings to help women to conceive or get
them through a difficult pregnancy. These beliefs of course predate the introduction of Christianity.

138
The origin of manioc cultivation, which was already fully developed by 3000 BC, is believed
by some scholars to go back as far as 5000-7000 BC Bitter manioc, an exclusively New
World member of the Euphorbiaceae that is much more nutritious than the sweet variety, in
its untreated state contains a high concentration of hydrocyanic (prussic) acid. The Indians
long ago learned to extract this poison in a complicated process by which the dangerous
acid is either evaporated or, preferably, converted into sugars that serve to render other
foods more palatable. Donald Lathrap (1970), one of the foremost students of tropical forest
Indian culture, argues that the invention of these procedures must lie far back in prehistory,
since archaeology has shown that bitter manioc was already the staple crop of flood-plain
agriculture in northern South America in the second millennium BC Since the genetic
modification of bitter manioc from its wild ancestor probably took millennia, the whole
process of manioc cultivation, so basic to tropical forest Indian culture, could well have had
at least its tentative experimental beginnings seven thousand and more years before the
present. The agricultural component of South American toad mythology obviously postdates
the origins of bitter-manioc cultivation, which are here linked to the poisonous white
secretion flowing from Toad Grandmother's parotid glands; on the other hand, this aspect of
the toad as animal avatar of the Earth Goddess could have been superimposed upon a much
older mythic complex. Considering the wide distribution of the Earth Mother-as-toad
mythology in South America and the striking similarity of this mythic theme to
Mesoamerican and even North American traditions, the Amazonian myth may ultimately
derive from very ancient Paleolithic roots that extend beyond the New World into Asia.

Psychotropic Properties of Toad Poison

Myth is one thing, practice another. True, bufotenine occurs coincidentally in the skin glands
of Bufo marinus and other species; and the related alkaloid, 5-methoxy-N,N-
dimethyltryptamine, which is mainly responsible for the hallucinogenic activity of Virola and
Anadenanthera snuffs, has recently been isolated from the North American desert toad,
Bufo alvarius (Erspamer et al., 1967; Daly and Witkop, 1971). But what actually is the
evidence that the Indians themselves ever utilized such animal poisons for purposes that
could be seen as magicoreligious?
Though widely scattered through the ethnographic literature, the evidence turns out to be
surprisingly substantial, beginning with an early Colonial account by the English Dominican
friar Thomas Gage, who reported in the mid-seventeenth century that the Pokoman Maya of
Guatemala had the habit of not just adding tobacco to their fermented ritual drink but also
poisonous toads to give it a special potency (Thompson, 1970)! This evidently ancient
practice, which managed to survive into modern times, may explain the large quantity of
skeletal remains of Bufo marinus which the Yale archaeologist Michael D. Coe found at the
important Olmec ceremonial site of San Lorenzo, in Veracruz, Mexico, dating to 1250-
900 BC (Coe, 1971). In view of the toad's high poison content and its sacred stature, Bufo
would hardly have served the Olmecs as ordinary food. But as animal manifestation of the
Earth Mother the toad could well have entered into magicoreligious inebriation—as much,
perhaps, for symbolic as for pharmacological considerations .
Preparations of Bufo marinus poison apparently still play a role in the pharmacopoeias of
some few indigenous curanderos (curers) in Veracruz, who claim that the secret techniques
by which the venom is extracted and processed into pills and potions have been passed
down to them through the generations from older masters, customarily their own fathers. It
is said that the toad is never killed or harmed but only irritated gently to make it release its
poison from the prominent parotid glands characteristic of the species. The poison is
collected in small bowls and subjected to repeated treatment over fire to remove or reduce
the harmful elements before being hardened. It is then rolled into pills for later use, love
magic being one of the reported purposes. (T. Knab, personal communication)

139
Such surviving practices help to explain the purpose of small, toad-shaped effigy bowls that
have been found in archaeological sites in Veracruz and adjacent parts of southeastern
Mexico. On these the ancient ceramic artists customarily emphasized the parotid glands that
contain the poison. The same emphasis marks a well-known monumental Aztec basalt
sculpture of a toad (with the glyph of the Mother Goddess of Terrestrial Water
Chalchiuhtlicue, Skirt of Jade, on her belly) in the National Museum of Anthropology in
Mexico City.

Analogies in Asian Mythology

The use of Bufo poison as magical folk medicine in Mexico recalls Chinese Taoist and
derivative Japanese traditions of the Gama sennin, a wise teacher and accomplished
herbalist who lived alone in the mountains in the company of a giant toad. The toad, who in
some versions is really the Gama sennin himself (Gama means "toad" in Japanese), taught
him the magical and healing arts, including the making of pills that enabled him to
transform at will into toad form. There are also Japanese and earlier Chinese traditions of
toads capable of conjuring up the most exquisite visions, especially a vision that brought
one face to face with the Taoist Islands of Paradise, in whose center stood a giant immortal
pine amid the most beautiful flowers, trees, and animals that symbolized eternal life; among
these is the fungus of immortality, the legendary Ling Chih, whose real ancestor may have
been the fly-agaric of Eurasiatic shamanism. What is more, the dwellers of this blessed
island stayed eternally young by drinking from the fountain of life at the foot of the
enormous, never-decaying pine, which reminds one of similar references cited by Wasson in
connection with Soma and the origins of the Tree of Life. (Volker, 1950:168-170)

Toad and Toadstool

Wasson (1968) also explored the whole problem of the toad's connection with Amanita
muscaria in European folk usage. The English "toadstool" is a nonspecific term that now
applies to all wild or inedible mushrooms, but Wasson showed that originally it referred to
the fly-agaric, as in fact the rural French crapaudin, the toad's thing, still does. The ancient
Finns also seem to have recognized a close affinity between Bufo and mushroom. In the
Kalevala, the great national saga of Finland, the heroes are forever searching for the
mysterious sampo, source of supernatural power. Just what sampo was has never been
satisfactorily explained, but recently an anthropological linguist, Lyle Campbell (personal
communication), discovered that in some Balto-Finnish dialects sampo stands for
"mushroom" as well as "toad," raising the distinct possibility that the legendary sampo may
be nothing else than the Finnish equivalent of Soma (see also Wasson, 1968:310-312). This
possibility is all the more likely in that the fly-agaric is known to have been employed in
Baltic shamanism as well.
Oddly enough, the toad-mushroom association, which in Europe seems to be very ancient,
reappears in the New World in Preclassic highland Guatemala, where toads by themselves
or toads with feline characters (the "earth monster" Tlaltecuhtli again), are depicted three-
dimensionally on "mushroom stones" dating to the first millennium BC The most interesting
of these is the already mentioned effigy with the mushroom emerging from the mouth of a
toad with prominent poison glands that is unmistakably meant to be Bufo marinus. One
would have to ignore some enormous gaps in space and time to suggest a direct connection
with the Old World, but the coincidence is certainly striking.

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Magical Uses of Frog and Toad Poison
Apart from the poison of Bufo marinus, which evidently does have what can be called
hallucinogenic properties, the venoms of some other species of toads or frogs in South
America have found uses that can only be described as magical, on occasion approximating
the ecstatic state, even if from the point of view of pharmacology and toxicology their action
belongs to a wholly different class. A good deal of the evidence then available from
travelers, ethnologists, and other sources was brought together more than forty years ago
by Wassen (1934), who came to the conclusion that the ubiquitous frog/toad motif in South
American Indian mythology and art, including the great number of effigies of cast gold from
pre-Hispanic Colombia and Panama, was inseparable from the practical use of frog venom
for blowgun-dart poison (which in any event had a magical component), and from the
widespread magicoreligious beliefs and practices involving the toxins of different species of
these amphibians.
One of the most unusual of these—and one that certainly typifies transformation and the
power of frogs to bring it about—is tapirage, a curious practice involving the use of frog or
toad poison to cause a change in the natural plumage of parrots. As described in the
Handbook of South American Indians (Steward, ed., 1963: Vol. 1, 265, 275, 424; Vol. 3,
102, 414; Vol. 6, 384, 397), in tapirage the feathers are plucked from a living bird and a
small quantity of the extremely potent poison of Dendrobates tinctorius or some other
venomous species is rubbed on the wound, which is then sealed with wax. When new
feathers appear they do so in a color different from the original ones, yellow and red
replacing green, for example. According to Gilmore (in Steward, ed., 1963: Vol. 6, 407-
408), the poisonous secretion of the toad (Bufo marinus) is also used in this manner.
Tapirage has been reported independently over the past two centuries from the Guianas,
the Gran Chaco, Brazil, Venezuela, and Bolivia, but some zoologists have tended to doubt
that the poison really plays any but a magical or symbolic role in the process. Instead they
assume that a change in the diet of the captured birds is more likely to be responsible.
Scores of Indian tribes from the Atlantic to the Andes believe otherwise.
On another level, as early as 1915 Walter E. Roth, colonial magistrate, medical officer and
protector of the Indians in the Pomeroon District of British Guiana (now independent
Guyana), reported in some detail on the magical use of the poisonous skin exudates and
spawn of certain frogs. The Indians, he wrote, rubbed these poisons into cuts made in the
skin, or else introduced them into the eyes, nose, mouth, and ears of men about to embark
on a hunt. These curious practices received their charter in myths, clearly related to those
of the Hero Twins, whose common theme is that a primordial hunter received his skill as gift
from Toad or Frog Woman, who rubbed her venom into his sensory organs to heighten their
acuity. After suffering drastic symptoms, including temporary loss of consciousness, the
mythic First Hunter found himself imbued with miraculous skills in the pursuit of game.
Likewise, Guyana Indian shamans employed toads and venomous frogs in ritual curing,
rubbing the animals over the body of the patient or else introducing the poison directly into
cuts.

141
In 1961, Drs. Gertrude Dole and Robert Carneiro (Carneiro, 1970) of the American Museum
of Natural History observed somewhat the same rites among the Amahuaca Indians of the
Peruvian Montana. The Amahuaca believe that the strongest hunting magic of all is for a
man to inoculate himself with an extremely potent frog poison. This is scraped off the back
of the frog with a small stick and rubbed into self-inflected burns on the arms or chest.
Within a short time the hunter becomes violently ill, suffering uncontrollable vomiting,
diarrhea, convulsions, and loss of consciousness. For some time thereafter he experiences
hallucinations which are interpreted as supernatural encounters with the spirits of the
forest. Since this phase is accompanied by the drinking of ayahuasca, it is not clear how
much of the actual ecstatic experience can be ascribed to the frog poison and how much to
Banisteriopsis. Of course, the radical purging of the system through the action of the poison
would tend to heighten the effects of the ayahuasca. In any event the two aspects of the
ritual are conceptually and functionally related.
Carneiro and Dole were unable to identify the frog involved, but it was probably a species
related to the kokoi frogs (Phyllobates bicolor and Dendrobates tinctorius) of Colombia,
whose secretions the Choco Indians use to poison their blowgun darts.
These spectacularly colored frogs and their poisons have been well-studied by toxicologists
and herpetologists (Daly and Witkop, 1971; Daly and Myers, 1967). Some species were
found to be astonishingly venomous—the secretion of one tree frog measuring less than an
inch in length was judged sufficient to kill a thousand mice! In fact the venoms of certain
species utilized by the Indians were found to constitute the most powerful natural toxins
known to man, and several species have turned out to be so potent that they cannot even
be handled safely without causing severe physical discomfort, including extreme irritation to
the eyes, nose, and throat. While none of these poisons should be called "hallucinogenic,"
even in the sense in which this can be said of bufotenine, some of their constituents are
known to affect the central nervous system, which may contribute to the supernatural
effects ascribed to them by some Amazonian Indians. For that matter, however a particular
Indian interprets the experience with toad or frog poison, whether taken internally or
rubbed into a wound, it is scientifically inexact in the extreme to equate these animal
poisons, including the venom of Bufo marinus, with the botanical hallucinogens: the massive
assault on the system brought on by bufotenine-containing Bufo venom is of a very different
order than the shift from one state of consciousness to another triggered by bufotenine-
containing snuff.
What should be stressed is that all these animal poisons, including that of Bufo marinus and
its relatives, are extremely potent, and that for anyone outside the traditional world, with its
great store of traditional knowledge, or outside strictly controlled scientific settings, to
experiment on himself or herself with these dangerous substances would obviously be the
height of folly.

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15. Hallucinogens And The Sacred Deer
Almost everywhere in the New World deer were important food animals. But almost
nowhere were they only that. On the contrary, few animals were so universally revered as
supernaturally endowed with a special power, and perhaps none was so widely associated
with shamans and shamanism. Consequently, even where deer was favorite and frequent
game, its hunt was never routine, its death never casual. To eat deer meat, it seems,
almost always and everywhere was at least as much a matter of feeding the spirit as the
body. If this was generally the case for everybody, it held even more for the shaman, so
much so that in some societies (the Warao of Venezuela, to mention one), for the shaman
to treat venison as ordinary food is still tantamount to cannibalism.
Deer deities or deer as divine beings occur prominently in the cosmologies and rituals of
innumerable peoples, from the Far North deep into South America, as they also do in
archaeological art. Sometimes the supernatural deer is male—Deer as patron of hunting, for
example—sometimes female, as supernatural mistress of the species or even of all animals,
or as animal wife to a primordial hunter and female ancestor of the human race.
Deer ceremonials to obtain supernatural power and other benefits—direct or indirect,
physical or spiritual, from the spirit of a particular deer or from the species as a whole—are
so widespread in North America as to be near-universal, not only among hunters but among
agricultural Indians as well. Many of the latter regard the deer as master and protector of
crops and fertility, invoking its spirit at every turn of the agricultural cycle, from the clearing
of the forest for a new field to the first fruits at harvest time. Among the Huichols, whose
culture hero Kauyumarie, we recall, is Deer and who have several other major deer deities,
every important agricultural endeavor is (or should be) preceded by a ceremonial deer
hunt; in fact, deer are never hunted or eaten except in a ritual context. In many origin
myths of North or South American Indians a supernatural Deer is directly associated with
other major supernaturals in the establishment of the most important aspects of culture and
the social order; so, for example, among the Ge-speakers of Brazil, one of the oldest
American Indian language families, Sun, Moon, and Deer set up the system of age-graded
societies.
Deer deities and ceremonialism were of overriding importance to the ancient Maya and
other ancient Mesoamerican peoples (as they continue to be in some areas), and this
outlook is of course reflected both in the complex calendrical system for which the Maya are
rightly admired and in pre-Columbian art as a whole. In some areas deer were sacrosanct
and could not be killed; Bemal Diaz del Castillo (1908:16), for example, reported that in the
country of the Mazatecs (deer people) in Oaxaca, tame deer were venerated as deities and
no deer could be hunted. From the enormous corpus of painted and carved Maya funerary
pottery, it is quite evident also that the deer played an important role in Maya beliefs about
the land of the dead, the Underworld; clearly the deer was intimately associated among the
Maya and other Mesoamerican Indians with magic, transformation, death ritual and the
Upper- and Underworlds, in particular the latter.

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It is a reflection of the extraordinary status of the deer as divine being, the special animal of
gods and shamans, in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica that in the process of Christian
acculturation Christ himself should sometimes have become identified with the deer—to the
degree that in some Indianized Good Friday ceremonies in Mexico the Passion itself is
treated like a sacrificial deer hunt. Among the Cora of Nayarit, for example, the symbolic
hunt for the divine deer, which ends in the crucifixion and interment of the Christ-Deer,
involves not just one animal but four, one each for the cardinal points, recalling the
traditional non-Christian Deer Dance of the New Mexico pueblos of San Ildefonso and San
Juan, which also culminates in the symbolic hunt and sacrificial death of four deer. There is
little question that the present-day syncretistic Cora ceremony and that of the Pueblos
ultimately derive from the same ancestral source.
The question is, how far back can we legitimately take this whole pan-American deer-
shamanism complex? Can we in fact consider it solely in the context of American
prehistory? I don't think so. American Indian deer-shamanism, with its particular emphasis
on the deer as divine source of medicine and curing power, is too obviously analogous to
the reindeer and deer shamanism of the Paleo-Siberians and their Eurasiatic Paleolithic and
Mesolithic antecedents to be anything other than its linear descendant (for an illuminating
discussion of antlered shamans and reindeer shamanism, see La Barre's chapter, "The
Dancing Sorcerer," in his The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion [1970d]).
Of particular pertinence to this problem is the deer's more or less intensive relationship to
several New World hallucinogens, sometimes to the point of total qualitative identification
between plant and animal. In these final paragraphs I would like to suggest this as a new
focus of inquiry, in the hope that it may help shed light on the genesis of the widely held
belief in the deer as source of supernatural power.
To the Huichols, we recall, the peyote is deer (and vice versa), whose inebriating flesh
enables mankind to "find its life." Although this fundamental aspect of Huichol metaphysics
is not theirs alone, it survives among them in its most dramatic and purest shamanistic
form. Further, Elder Brother Deer is the Huichol shaman's guardian par excellence, his
mount to the upper levels of the universe, and his indispensable spirit helper in curing. That
the deer-peyote identification is of respectable antiquity in Mexico is at least suggested by a
remarkable effigy snuffing pipe from Oaxaca, dating to ca. 400-200 BC, which represents a
reclining deer holding in its mouth a realistically modeled peyote cactus (see photo, p. 155).
The upturned tail of the animal forms the perforated nosepiece (Furst, 1974b).
North of Mexico we find the deer widely associated with tobacco, and also with Datura; in
the Andes, on the other hand, the deer seems to have been in some way identified with
Anadenanthera colubrina, the principal hallucinogenic component of the divine compound
known as huiica or wilka, judging from Moche vase paintings of the sixth century AD of
ceremonial deer-hunt scenes, in which the animal is almost always flanked by A. colubrina,
and sometimes also by free-floating Anadenanthera seed pods. In the Southern Plains, deer
were very much involved in the ecstatic-shamanistic mescal-bean (Sophora secundiflora)
medicine cults, among whose essential purposes was the securing of supernatural power
("medicine"), as well as sustenance, from the deer or from its larger cousin the elk. Indeed,
in historic times at least, these rites were often referred to as "Deer Dance." In the ancient
rock art of the Pecos River area of Texas, whose iconography seems to be related to early
precursors of the historic mescal-bean ceremonies, the most common animals again are
deer, sometimes depicted in association with mountain lions and anthropomorphic figures
believed to be shamans (Newcomb, 1967).

144
Zuni cosmology weaves the deer into an intricate symbol complex that is strikingly
reminiscent of the deer-maize-peyote complex among the Huichols—not really surprising in
light of the many other cultural parallels between Southwestern Pueblos and the Cora-
Huichols of western Mexico. As was noted earlier, the sacred hallucinogenic plant of the Zuni
Rain Priest Fraternity is Datura inoxia—aneklaka in Zuni—whose white, trumpet-shaped
flowers stand for the East. However, there is also another divine plant, called tenatsali,
never identified botanically, which stands for the Zenith and which the Zunis say embodies
all the sacred flowers or plants of the world directions (the four cardinal points plus zenith
and nadir): the yellow sego lily (Calochortus nuttallii var. aureus) for the north; the blue
sego lily (C. nuttallii), and sometimes also lupine (Lupinus palmerii or aduncus) for the
west; the red cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis or splendens) for the south; the white
flower of Datura inoxia for the east; the "multicolored" flower, encompassing all of the other
colors, of tenatsali itself for the zenith, and an unidentified root for the nadir, whose color is
black.
Now, say the Zunis, all these flowers, and the plants which bear them—including, of course.
Datura inoxia, which is in a sense the most important because it stands for the east—have
an irresistible attraction for deer, who "go crazy with them"; in the esoteric songs,
therefore, we find the Zuni hunter magically transforming into these flowers so as to draw
deer toward himself and within range of his arrows. (Deer, by the way, move within an
eternal closed cycle of death and rebirth, meaning that at death they travel to Katchina
Village to be reborn as deer, whereas Zunis who were members of the Katchina Societies go
through three cycles of death and rebirth as spiritual beings but are reborn as deer when
they die the fourth time).
It may be that tenatsali will never be specifically identified, for the reason that it may not be
a botanical species at all but a compound representing a sacred concept—a symbol complex
embodying all the sacred flowering plants of the world directions together with the deer,
with Datura responsible for whatever psychoactivity figures in tenatsali medicine.* That, at
any rate, is the preliminary conclusion of Barbara and Dennis Tedlock, anthropologists who
have spent several years exploring the richness and sophistication of the traditional Zuni
world (cf. Tedlock, 1972, and personal communication).

American Indian Deer Symbolism: Asiatic Roots or Independent Origins?

The question, of course, is why of all possible animals the relatively gentle, herbivorous
deer should recur over and over again as source of supernatural medicine power, and why it
should so often be identified or associated with those plants that facilitate entry into the
world of spirits. There are undoubtedly many levels of explanation for this phenomenon. But
the fact remains that not only are deer considered to be closer to humans than any other
animal by many American Indian societies, but where psychoactive plants are used, we
often find deer closely associated with them—not, to be sure, always to the point of total
identification and interchangeability, as between deer and peyote among the Huichols, but
still closely enough to be impressive as a cultural phenomenon, and one, besides, that
seems to have its counterpart, if not in fact its antecedents, in Paleo-Siberian mushroom
shamanism. Here, again, Wasson's Soma is a rich source of information, as are Eurasian
archaeology and ethnology.

*
In addition, it may be that the cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis or splendens, which belongs to a genus from
which lobeline, an alkaloid used in western medicine chiefly as a respiratory stimulant, has been isolated) also
contributes some psychoactivity. Species of Lobelia have long been a part of the herbal pharmacopoeia of different
Indian populations, including those of Mesoamerica, asthma being one of the afflictions which Aztec physicians
treated with a Lobelia preparation. Indians of northeastern North America also smoke the cardinal flower as a
substitute for tobacco (hence its popular but botanically erroneous name "Indian tobacco").

145
It is evident from Neanderthal burials in central Asia and from mankind's earliest art in the
great Paleolithic cave galleries of the Dordogne, as much as from the early rock art of
western North America, that cervids of all kinds, and especially deer, were not merely an
important food resource but a special font of metaphysical benefits, and that in Eurasia
generally deer and shamans have apparently stood in a special relationship from very early
times.
In northern Eurasia, wherever shamanism survived into recent times, the deer—specifically
the reindeer—is still the shaman's animal. Among the Reindeer Tungus, for example, as
among other tribes of Siberia, the deer is his spirit mount that carries him in his ecstatic
trance to the realm of the sky people. The traditional shaman's costume of many Siberian
tribes is festooned with deer symbolism, and the shaman's cap, without which he cannot
properly shamanize, is frequently crowned by iron antler effigies or by real horns, for it is
the animal horn that since time immemorial has embodied the concept of supernatural
power and eternal renewal. (Early engravings showing antlered Siberian shamans in their
full animal disguise are virtually indistinguishable from their Paleolithic counterparts in the
cave sanctuaries of France). The northern forest and tundra people still live in an intimacy
with the reindeer, wild and semidomesticated, that is hard for us to imagine, amounting
almost to a symbiotic relationship, writes Wasson (1968:75). There is little doubt that this
very ancient spiritual connection between man and the sacred deer, dating to a time long
before reindeer were ever domesticated, inspired the horse nomads of central Asia to
transform their mounts magically into stags by crowning them with antlers. Such antlered
horses, presumably meant to carry their deceased Scythian riders into the Otherworld in the
manner of Siberian shamans on their reindeer, were found by Russian archaeologists in the
well-preserved "frozen tombs" of Pazaryk, in southern Siberia, dating to ca. 600-500 BC
(Gryaznov, 1969).

The Reindeer and the Sacred Mushroom

Now, it happens that not only Siberian shamans but their reindeer as well were involved
with the sacred mushrooms. Several early writers on Siberian customs reported that
reindeer shared with man a passion for the inebriating mushroom, and further, that at times
the animals urgently sought out human urine, a peculiarity that greatly facilitated the work
of the herders in rounding them up—and that might just possibly have assisted their
reindeer-hunting ancestors in early efforts at domestication:
… these animals (reindeer) have frequently eaten that mushroom, which they
like very much. Whereupon they have behaved like drunken animals, and
then have fallen into a deep slumber. When the Koryak encounter an
intoxicated reindeer, they tie his legs until the mushroom has lost its strength
and effect. Then they kill the reindeer. If they kill the animal while it is drunk
or asleep and eat of its flesh, then everybody who has tasted it becomes
intoxicated as if he had eaten the actual fly agaric. (Georg Wilhelm Steller,
1774, in Wasson, 1968: 239-240)

146
 … in one of those open places in the woods we gathered twenty mushrooms,
to the immense joy of the older of my companions who, as an enthusiastic
devotee of this intoxicant, again praised its powers and its benefits. He
affirmed, from his own experience, the most varied effects of this mushroom
on herbivorous animals: wild reindeer that have eaten some of them are
often found so stupefied that they can be tied with ropes and taken away
alive; their meat then intoxicates everyone who eats it, but only if the
reindeer is killed soon after being caught; and from this it appears that the
communicability of the narcotic substance lasts about as long as it would have
affected the animals' own nerves. (Adolph Erman, 1833:304-306, in Wasson,
1968:235)
As for the reindeer's longing for human urine, we are told by the distinguished Russian
anthropologist Waldemar Jochelson (1905) that the Koryak had special sealskin containers,
called "the reindeer's night-chamber," in which every herdsman collected his urine. This was
used to attract refractory animals, who apparently required urine whenever they fed
exclusively on certain lichens. So strong was this passion, he reports, that men urinating in
the open ran a real risk of being run down by reindeer, who have a keen sense of smell,
coming at him at full gallop from all sides!
From a strictly psychopharmacological point of view, Steller's and Erman's accounts are in
one respect impossible, in that the tribesmen could not have become inebriated by eating
only the meat of an intoxicated reindeer. But it is possible that the early writers missed
something, and that the contents of the bladder were consumed for that purpose—perhaps
in a hunting rite akin to the walrus-bladder ritual of Alaskan Eskimos. The urine of reindeer
"drunk" with fly-agaric would of course be as hallucinogenic as that of humans.
On the other hand, what if to the Siberians the reindeer itself was fly-agaric, as to the
Huichols deer and peyote are one? Then the killing and sacrificial eating of the inebriated
deer would take on a very different and much more profound meaning, akin to the
eucharistic implications of the Huichol Deer-Peyote sacrifice.
Whether or not such an interpretation has substance, the intimate relationship between the
reindeer and the sacred mushroom is beyond question, as is the fact that this animal, which
before the melting of the Pleistocene glaciers ranged much farther south than it does today,
was one of the principal animals not only in the physical but also the spiritual universe of
the Paleolithic ancestors of the first Americans. To some degree China is involved here as
well, in light of the fact that according to Chinese mythology it is the deer that leads man to
the legendary Ling Chih, the divine mushroom of immortality. Such a concept might, as
Wasson (1968) has suggested, have diffused to China in the third century BC from India,
but it could conceivably have come to the Chinese from western or southern Siberia, at an
earlier time for which we have no written records, out of the same shamanistic stratum to
which the Indian Soma rite ultimately owes its origin. The analogy between the Chinese
tradition of the deer as a near-immortal precisely because of its association with a
mushroom to which it points the way for man and the reindeer-mushroom identification in
Siberia is strong enough to suggest something more direct than secondary diffusion
northward across the Himalayas from a region in which all memory of Soma as mushroom
had by then long disappeared.

147
All this brings us back to La Barre and the origins of the great hallucinogenic complex of
Indian America. It is certainly tempting, on the basis of the above, to suggest that beyond
the phenomenon of deer shamanism, the specific identification of the deer with plant
hallucinogens also has its roots in an ecstatic Eurasian shamanism in which the reindeer's
physical and metaphysical relationship to the sacred inebriating mushroom was an integral
element. If so, the shamanistic deer-hallucinogen association that we now recognize in the
Americas could have been already present in the ideational universe which the earliest
Americans carried with them into the New World from the northeast Asian homeland,
15,000-25,000 or more years ago.
Proposing that possibility, of course, is assuming a great deal. But whether or not one is
justified in postulating cultural survivals over such an enormous time span—and I, for one,
would not reject this out of hand as at least a possibility—it is also conceivable that a deer-
mushroom complex arose quite independently in the New World, out of the peculiar ecology
of one of the principal species of psychoactive fungi employed in Mesoamerican ritual.

Deer-Mushroom Ecology in Mexico

As was noted in another chapter, Stropharia cubensis, reportedly the strongest
hallucinogenically of all the psychoactive species found in Mexico, is a dung fungus; it is
typically found growing on manure in open meadows. Like other mushrooms, Stropharia
reproduces by releasing countless microscopic spores from its gills into the wind, which
deposits them in the surrounding grassland.* Like those of other coprophyllic species, the
spores of S. cubensis do not germinate directly when they reach a suitable environment but
require passage through the digestive system of grazing animals; in other words, they are
ingested with the forage, being subsequently deposited as the animal evacuates. Not all
herbivorous animals are capable of playing this essential symbiotic role, however; rather, it
appears that to propagate, Stropharia requires the complex digestive system of ruminants.
And indeed, the mushroom is today typically found on cow dung.
This curious circumstance has long worried those who, like Wasson, have studied Mexican
mushroom cults in depth and been impressed with the important role Stropharia plays in
these cults. The Mazatecs of Oaxaca, and perhaps some of the Maya of Chiapas and other
Mesoamerican peoples to whom Stropharia is sacred, harvest the mushrooms in the rainy
season in grassy meadows where cattle have been browsing. But cattle were unknown in
the Americas before the coming of the Europeans. So the question naturally arises, in light
of its apparent dependence on domestic ruminants, is Stropharia also a foreign import into
Mexico? Or is there some indigenous species of animal that could have played the same
essential role in pre-Hispanic times?
The answer is yes. And the animal is the deer. As a ruminant it is in fact the only species
that could have served as Stropharia's host in Mexico and—assuming that the
multichambered stomachs of ruminants are indeed the crucial factor—assured its survival as
a species. In light of such an essential and easily observable relationship between deer and
their preferred sacred psychoactive mushroom, the strict prohibition by the sixteenth-
century Mazatecs of Oaxaca against the killing of deer in their country, and indeed their
very name, which means "people of the deer," take on new significance.

*
I am indebted to John Haines, mycologist for the New York State Museum in Albany, for clarifying the ecology of
Stropharia cubensis.

148
To return to the question of Paleolithic or Mesolithic survivals, the discovery, by early
migrants into Mexico, of a functional deer-mushroom relationship could, conceivably, have
served to reinforce whatever ancient Asian traditions might then still have remained alive
concerning the deer as source of supernatural power, and especially the visionary gifts of
shamans. Thus, to borrow Albert Hofmann's imagery, another research series, culture-
historical and ecological rather than strictly pharmacological, might be said to close like a
magic circle.

149
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